Welcome to MEWarpX’s documentation!

Introduction

MEWarpX is a set of tools for running and postprocessing WarpX simulations for thermionic applications. This includes functionality that couples to WarpX’s python interface to inject thermionically emitted electrons at every simulation step (see ThermionicInjector) from an Emitter. Emitters can include both domain boundaries and embedded conductors. The velocity of thermionically emitted electrons are sampled from the distribution function derived in the supplemental material of Groenewald et. al. (2021). Furthermore, both the emitted and absorbed charge at every simulation step can be recorded for all conductors in the simulation. This allows tracking of electrical currents in the simulation as a function of time, through the flux_diagnostic module.

Using a fully kinetic approach (such as a particle-in-cell code) to simulate the underlying particle dynamics in a thermionic converter is important since the particle populations have been observed to be strongly non-Maxwellian (see page 23 on Lietz et. al. (2021) results).

The package is openly available from the MEWarpX Github repo.

For more details about thermionics and their applications as well as other details about Modern Electron please visit the company website.

Usage

To use Modern Electron WarpX Tools in a project:

import mewarpx

Examples scripts of simulations that use the package can be found in the Examples directory. More usage information should come in the future.

Installation

Prerequisites include: numpy, scipy, WarpX.

See Python package development use for information on how to do an efficient compile and install of everything. That is the configuration we expect to consistently use.

If you only want to install the python package component:

  • As a user, you can run make devel or make devel-all. These use the pip package manager, but they also set it so that a symlink to the current directory is inserted into your python user environment; changes made to the source will automatically be used in new import mewarpx calls.

  • In a virtual environment, run make devel-system or make devel-all-system for the same effect.

make devel-all and make devel-all-system will also install all optional dependencies. This, notably, will let you run make test, or equivalently pytest, to check that the whole distribution is running properly (which requires WarpX compilation, however, again see Python package development use for details).

For building all docs in latex format, latexmk, and a number of latex packages, must be installed as well. Installing a full texlive distribution will satisfy package requirements.

Compatibility

Targeting python 3.6+

Authors

mewarpx was written by Modern Electron.

Indices and tables