Fusor Forums

Looking to model the electric field for our fusor design prior to construction. Anyone have any recommendations as to which software to use? I was contemplating using MatLab.

SIMION will do it quite well

I posted a "list of useful software" in the past:

http://fusor.net/board/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=9526

It lists Elmer, for the static E field any FEM will do.

Maybe it's better to maintain this list outside the forum somewhere, with an os, price and license matrix. I posted it to see if anyone would come up with more ideas to make the list more complete.

Real dynamic plasma simulations are way more difficult, a friend of mine who works on simulations for a living started shaking his head and wishing me "good luck" when I told him what I wanted to simulate
Recently I took a look at IBSIMU, seems useful for ion guns, http://ibsimu.sourceforge.net , I just need a new brain to get started....

Another good FEM framework is moose:

http://mooseframework.org/

I'm on the same team as Bloom, we're investigating using Matlab & simulink to 3D plot the electric field vectors. Does anyone have any experience or opinions on using those?

I had an electromagnetics class that required a review of a research paper, so I picked one related to fusors. It's called "An inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) device modeling and the effects of different cathode structures to the fields", and details the use of software called ANSYS Maxwell to model the electric and potential fields.

http://www.researchgate.net/publication ... the_fields

It may not be possible to get the software, but perhaps the paper could help in some way.