Starfish is a 2D (Cartesian or axisymmetric) code for simulating a wide range of plasma and gas problems. It implements the electrostatic Particle-in-Cell (ES-PIC) method along with several fluid solvers. Material interactions are included through MCC or DSMC collisions, or via chemical reactions. The computational domain can be divided into multiple rectilinear or body-fitted meshes, and linear/cubic splines represent the surface geometry. The code can be easily extended with plugins. Starfish is written in Java and is actively being developed.

Start by taking a look at a five-step ES-PIC and DSMC tutorials. Input files for the tutorials are included in the dat directory. On the PIC-C website you will also find a PowerPoint presentation with some introductory remarks about the source code. The associated video is available here.

Input files for these examples are located in the dat/ folder.

Axial velocity of ions streaming past a charged sphere

DSMC computation of temperature in an atmospheric jet expanding to a low pressure tank

Number density of ions flowing through a sectioned tube computed on a domain consisting of multiple meshes

The code is under ongoing development and may contain numerous bugs. Please submit a bug report if you find anything odd!

Please view LICENSE for license terms.

(c) 2012-2018 Particle In Cell Consulting LLC

Contact us by visiting the website or on Twitter @particleincell.

• v0.20 Rename of Starfish-LE to Starfish, addition of thermionic emission, evaporation, and particle merge
• v0.19 Re-enables support for multi-domain simulations
• v0.16.2 Various bug fixes related to DSMC and ambient boundary source
• v0.16 Addition of a DSMC module (previously included in the full version)
• v0.15 Initial release of PIC-MCC code