User-friendly, economical, 3D charged particle code with adaptive meshing

Summary form only given, as follows. Calabazas Creek Research, Inc., in association with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Simmetrix, Inc., is developing a user-friendly 3-D, finite element, charged particle code with adaptive meshing. This program builds on the particle pusher and emission algorithms developed during the 2-D development, which demonstrated that the technical approach provided the functionality and accuracy required. The 2-D and 3-D charged particle codes use unstructured meshes that are not restricted in terms of size or density and are ideal for adaptive meshing. The size of the mesh in any particular region is primarily determined by the local field gradients and the presence of the beam. This reduces the number of nodes by orders of magnitude, allowing modeling of problems that were previously impractical to analyze. The adaptive meshing feature allows the field solver and particle pusher to automatically determine the minimum mesh density required throughout the problem domain based on user specified error criteria. This capability allows the codes to solve problems involving fine structures, such as the grid region in gridded electron guns, or for modeling thin hollow beams far from axis, such as those in high power gyrotrons. The menu driven user interface will be incorporated in AutoCAD and Solid Works. Mesh generation will be accomplished using the MeshSim toolkit produced by Simmetrix Inc. The error estimation and mesh adaptation procedures are being developed by RPI's Scientific Computation Research Center. This presentation will provide details of the code operation and capabilities.