ThunderBoltz: An Open-Source 0D Direct Simulation Monte-Carlo Boltzmann Solver for Plasma Transport and Chemical Kinetics

Large-scale 3D plasma codes involve a complex assembly of procedures that are not always necessary to test effects of underlying physical models. Here we present ThunderBoltz, a lightweight, publicly available 0D particle Monte Carlo code designed to accommodate a generalized combination of species and arbitrary cross sections without the overhead of expensive field solves or statistical particle reweighting. Based on the no-time counter collision method, it can efficiently produce high-quality electron velocity distributions in external AC/DC E-field and static B-field scenarios. It is a C++ standard library implementation, also provided with a convenient Python API which allows for input file generation from the LXCat data base, electron transport and reaction rate post processing, input parameter constraint satisfaction, calculation scheduling, and diagnostic plotting.

In this poster, we present the capabilities of ThunderBoltz and demonstrate the dependence of electron transport on a variety of collisional parameters. We also demonstrate agreement with other 0D codes, such as Bolsig for benchmark problems.