Home - vonkarmaninstitute/pantera-pic-dsmc GitHub Wiki

Welcome to the wiki.

Pantera is a PIC-DSMC code jointly developed at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics and at the Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Aerospaziali of Politecnico di Milano. It is a tool for the numerical simulation of reacting, ionized flows in thermal and chemical nonequilibrium. Currently, Pantera can simulate 1D, 2D, and 2D axisymmetric flows.

Pantera grew out from a DSMC code initially written by Prof. Aldo Frezzotti, in F77. This code was parallelized in MPI and adapted in Fortran 90 by Federico Bariselli ("the Gambler" code). Stefano Boccelli partially rewrote it to introduce hybrid PIC-DSMC capabilities. During his Research Master at VKI, Pietro Parodi completed the integration of the two methods, made the code multispecies, and introduced axisymmetric treatment, as well as methods for elastic and inelastic collisions and chemical reactions.

Along the way, a number of MSc students worked on it as well, bringing sometimes little and sometimes huge contributions.

A couple of notes for the developer. You are very welcome to contribute to Pantera! Please try to keep the programming style similar to the one that you find (3 spaces for indenting, uppercase for language directives, and maybe uppercase for other stuff as well).

REMINDER: Remember to write real numbers with a decimal, or at least a dot, as "2.", not just "2". Fortran is not Matlab and you will introduce a bug. Also mind divisions when integers are involved. You may get a zero where you naively expected a real number. Convert integers to reals for divisions.

But most importantly, always follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Keep in mind our aim:

• We want Pantera to grow in power and allow to run (reasonably) complex and heavy simulations;
• But it must allow average-level programmers and students to develop it and include new physics. Many of us want to do physics, not IT...
• And maybe most importantly, an unnecessarily complex code will hinder development and lower the outcome of any programming effort.

Please, comment thoroughly the code. You will forget what you did and will need to refresh your memory. Others will need to understand (quickly) what you did to develop further. If you're adding a substantial contribution to the code and you think it may help other users, it would be a great idea to write one or more wiki pages to document it.

The development of this wiki was started in September 2020 as an evolving documentation for the software. Everyone is invited to contribute to the wiki by writing pages about the methods they implemented in Pantera. Addition of verification test cases and related references is always welcome. In this way, the wiki can become a true learning portal on rarefied and plasma flows based on the experience of the contributors, in addition to a basic User's Guide.

• Federico Bariselli is currently Research Engineer at VKI. His expertise is mainly in rarefied gas and plasma dynamics, atmospheric entry flows and their chemistry, with particular application to meteors. He worked on the parallelization of the early version of Pantera and implementation of collision routines.
• Stefano Boccelli, former VKI PhD, is currently at NASA Goddard SFC. He worked extensively on Pantera and used it for verification of his results obtained with Moment Methods. Most importantly he created the beautiful ascii art logo that you see whenever you launch the code!
• Pietro Parodi is currently a PhD researcher at VKI and KU Leuven, working on the "Modeling and simulation of air plasmas using particle methods applied to Air-Breathing Electric Propulsion". He worked on Pantera during his Research Master at VKI, implementing multispecies capabilities, collisional routines, and the explicit Poisson solver. His research interest in numerics focuses on (semi-)implicit solvers (see, for instance, Lapenta 2016) for plasma flows, which are implemented in Pantera.
• Thierry Magin is professor at VKI and Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). His expertise spans and binds together kinetic theory, aerothermodynamics, and numerical methods. He supervised the work of FB, SB, PP, and many others.
• Jan Skácel is a PhD student at VKI and Masaryk University (Brno, CZ). His thesis topic is space platform charging. He worked on the implementation in Pantera of surface charging and on the Fluid electrons model.
• Hermes Scandelli worked on coupling Pantera to an SPH solver to study atmospheric entry ablation, in collaboration with FB.
• Matilde Cacopardi worked on Pantera as Master student at PoliMi, coupling rigid-body physics with particle dynimics, for a wide range of possible applications.
• Many students that used and contributed to the development of the code.