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MCTrans++ -- A 0D modelling tool for centrifugal mirrors

MCTrans++ is a C++ reimplementation of the original MCTrans Mathematica tool developed by Prof. A. Hassam of University of Maryland at College Park to model the Maryland Centrifugal Experiment.

MCTrans++ uses a variety of simplified models for the behaviour of a centrifugally-confined mirorr plasma to provide a capability for rapid scoping of experimental operating points. This tool is not intended to replace detailed ab initio modelling -- benchmarking studies will be listed in this README to provide some sense of where this tool is known to be representative of the detailed physics. This tool cannot provide quantitatively accurate results for any given experiment! If you are very lucky these results may be good to 50%!

Detailed analyses that lead to the formulae implemented in the code are provided in the document in the notes/ subdirectory of this distribution.

Getting Started

You will need to download this codebase and compile it in order to run MCTrans++.

Prerequisites

To compile and use MCTrans++ you will need a system with the following

  • A C++20 compliant C++ compiler.
  • The Boost C++ Template Library
  • The TOML11 library
  • The SUNDIALS library, Version 6.0.0 or newer -- SUNDIALS v5.8.0 is no longer supported, please upgrade from 5.x.y to 6.0.0 or newer
  • NETCDF C and NETCDF C++ 4.3 or newer (depends upon netcdf C interface 4.6.0 or newer)

Precise dependencies have not been exhaustively tested. Running on Windows requires the installation of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and installing the following programs on an administrator bash shell. MacOS requies python3 and of miniconda.

Building MCTrans++

All the build options are set in the file Makefile.local, which you need to provide for your system. An example is provided in Makefile.local.example -- copy this file to Makefile.local and make any edits needed. This file is in GNU-compatable Makefile format, and you can set and override all the compilation options here. For example, if you are not using the default compiler (g++), then you can add a line to Makefile.local that reads CXX = /path/to/my/c++/compiler.

If you're happy with this, let's proceed!

  1. Clone this repository into your chosen location.
  2. Install the Boost library, either using your system package manager or manually by downloading from here. If this is a system-wide install, proceed to step 2. If you downloaded the Boost libraries, add a line to Makefile.local which sets BOOST_DIR = /path/to/boost.
  3. Clone the TOML11 library into a directory of your choice. If you clone it into the default location of MCTrans/toml11, proceed to step 3. As with Boost, set TOML11_DIR = /path/to/toml11 in Makefile.local.
  4. Install SUNDIALS and edit Makefile.local to set SUNDIALS_DIR to the location you have installed the Sundials library in. If you are only using SUNDIALS for MCTrans++, a quick intro to installing SUNDIALS is inclued below.
  5. Install NETCDF C and NETCDF C++. On Linux and WSL, you can install the necessary packages with the default package manager: apt-get install libnetcdf-dev libnetcdff-dev libnetcdf-c++4-dev libnetcdf-c++4-1. On MacOS, you can use either brew install netcdf or conda install -c anaconda netcdf4 to install the C version, and conda install -c conda-forge netcdf-cxx4 to install the C++ version. Please specify in Makefile.local where these libraries are installed. For example, NETCDF_DIR = /usr/local/Cellar/netcdf/4.8.0_2 and NETCDF_CXX_DIR = /Users/<username>/miniconda3 if you used brew and conda to install on MacOS.
  6. Set any other options, e.g. setting the variable DEBUG to any value will build a version that you can use to develop MCTrans++ and that includes debug information.
  7. Run make MCTrans++.
  8. Test with make test.
  9. Run specific example files with ./MCTrans++ examples/<filename>.conf.

To compile the manual you will need a copy of pdflatex, bibtex, and revtex4. A pre-compiled copy of the manual is also distributed in this repository.

Installing SUNDIALS

If you are only building a version of SUNDIALS for use with MCTrans++ the included script build_sundials should provide the minimal needed installation of SUNDIALS. If using MacOS, coreutils and cmake must be installed to run the build executable.

If this is your first use of SUNDIALS, and you want a custom install, a quick guide to installing the base libraries follows here.

Pick where you want the sundials sources / build tree / compiled libraries to go. We will call these directories SUNDIALS_SOURCE, SUNDIALS_BUILD, and SUNDIALS_INSTALL in the following. One suggestion would be

SUNDIALS_SOURCE = ~/sundials/source
SUNDIALS_BUILD  = ~/sundials/build
SUNDIALS_INSTALL = ~/sundials/

With these directories picked, we can download and compile SUNDIALS.

  1. Download the SUNDIALS source from here or here into SUNDIALS_SOURCE
  2. Move to SUNDIALS_BUILD. Configure the SUNDIALS build with
cmake $SUNDIALS_SOURCE -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$SUNDIALS_INSTALL -DEXAMPLES_INSTALL=off

   If this gives you any errors (lack of C compiler, etc), refer to the SUNDIALS documentation.
  1. Compile SUNDIALS with make -j install.
  2. You now have sundials installed into the SUNDIALS_INSTALL directory. This is the path you should set SUNDIALS_DIR to in your MCTrans Makefile.local

Example Configurations

Example configurations live in the examples/ subdirectory. For each example there is a corresponding example output file named .report. There is also a check_examples.sh script that will check all the examples still work.

Built With

  • Boost - C++ Template library that radically extends the STL
  • TOML11 - For parsing configuration files written in TOML
  • Sundials - Suite of libraries from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for numerical solution of Nonlinear Algebraic Equations, ODEs and DAEs
  • NETCDF C and NETCDF C++ - A set of software libraries and machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data.

Known Issues

General issues include the fact that the steady-state equations may have multiple roots. Options exist including running a nonlinear solver from a given initial condition, or running the time-dependent solver to steady-state from a given initial condition.

Specific known issues are listed here.

  • Debug builds currently fail on OSX due to the use of feenableexcept().

Contributing

Contributions to this project through the github interface are welcome. However, as we are currently in active development, please email the authors if you wish to get involved -- surprise PRs may be ignored.

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.

Authors

  • Ian Abel - C++ Version - Ian Abel at UMD
  • Adil Hassam - Original MCTrans Code
  • Nick Schwartz
  • Myles Kelly

For full copyright attribution, see the COPYRIGHT file. For a summary of contributors, see the contributors page.

License

This project is licensed under the 3-Clause BSD Licence - see the LICENSE.md file for details