jgbrasier / boltzmann-simulation

Maxwell-Boltzmann numerical simulation: particle in a box simulation (C/C++) and energy distribution simulation using a simple collision model (Python)

Boltzmann simulation

Study of Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution

Particle-in-a-box (PIB) simulation written in C with C++ graphics animator. Uses event-driven programming.

Has thermal gradient and mobile vertical wall.

Project done for my computer programming class at ESPCI Paris under supervision from Prof. Didier Cassereau.

Final grade: A+

To run

Clone repo: $ git clone https://github.com/jgbrasier/boltzmann-simulation

Build main (in repo directory): make ./start

Run start

Outputs

program outputs a distribution.txt histogram of velocities.

Parameters

In main():

• Np (Number of particles): varies number of particles (currently program does not run with Np > 200)
• diameter (particle diameter): if increase diameter, reduce Np (ther is no adaptive window scaling, you may encounter a run-time error)

Study of the Boltzmann energy distribution

Jupyter Notebook detailing a simple collision model where only the energy of a particle in considered. At each timestep, particles have a probability p of exchanging their energies.