Sum Currents

This plugin computes the total current integrated/added over the entire volume simulated.

.cfg file

The plugin can be activated by setting a non-zero value with the command line flag --sumcurr.period. The value set with --sumcurr.period is the periodicity, at which the total current is computed. E.g. --sumcurr.period 100 computes and prints the total current for time step 0, 100, 200, ….

Memory Complexity

Accelerator

negligible.

Host

negligible.

Output

The result is printed to standard output. Therefore, it goes both to ./simOutput/output as well as to the output file specified by the machine used (usually the stdout file in the main directory of the simulation). The output is ASCII-text only. It has the following format:

[ANALYSIS] [_rank] [COUNTER] [SumCurrents] [_currentTimeStep] {_current.x _current.y _current.z} Abs:_absCurrent
Value Description Unit
_rank MPI rank at which prints the particle position none
_currentTimeStep simulation time step = number of PIC cycles none
_current.x _current.y _current.z electric current Ampere per second
_absCurrent magnitude of current Ampere per second

In order to extract only the total current information from the output stored in stdout, the following command on a bash command line could be used:

grep SumCurrents stdout > totalCurrent.dat

The plugin data is then stored in totalCurrent.dat.

Known Issues

Currently, both output and stdout are overwritten at restart. All data from the plugin is lost, if these file are not backuped manually.