XPCELL A Computer Program to visualize Convective Plasma Cells
by Rodrigo Carboni Méndez and Francisco Frutos Alfaro
The program xpcell (Linux Version) needs the XForms and the Mesa Libraries (OpenGL).
The old version is also available: convection.
The source codes are also available pcell.zip and xpcell.zip.
Papers
PCell: A 2D Program for Visualizing Convective Plasma Cells, Computing in Science and Engineering, pp. 101-104, July/August, 2004.
Computer simulation of convective plasma cells, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, 67, pp. 1809-1814, 2005.
XPCell: The Control Panel
The Control Panel interface has the following items:
The velocity field parameter input: The user chooses the velocity field selecting a value of the m parameter 0 The magnetic Reynolds number input: The user enters the magnetic Reynolds number 0 The running time input: The user enters this time to stops the program.
Initial MF (Magnetic Field) Configuration is not yet implemented.
The Draw button: This button starts the program that calculates the magnetic field at each time interval.
The Redraw Button: To display the simulation again. For PCell, this useful to avoid repaeting an already existing calculation.
The Stream button: Displays the mechanical motion of plasma.
The Movie button: The users can create their own movies and display the movies with a mplayer. The name of the created movie is convection.mpg for pcell and convection.avi for xpcell.
The Help button is not yet implemented.
The Exit button: To leave the session. If the user wants to remove all pcell*.dat then type rm -rf pcell*.dat on the prompt.
Internet Subroutines
We use Bourke's contouring program, CONREC.
References
R. Carboni, Convective Plasmas, MSc. thesis in spanish, School of Physics, University of Costa Rica, 1994.
Coments and suggestions to: francisco.frutos@ucr.ac.cr or frutto@tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de
Last version on 14 January 2009.