Member and former system administrator of the Plasma Theory and Simulation Group, a group headed by Professor Birdsall and Professor Verboncoeur dedicated to first principles simulations of ionized gases and comparison to theory and experimental data.
Now employed full time at The Open Planning Project.
Research Interests: plasmas, electromagnetics, scientific computing, kinetic theory
See my resume.
CURRENT RESEARCH:
Sponsored by Benet Laboratories. As current is applied to a gas, it will reach the condition of self-sustainance where each electron produced by secondary emission will ionize enough particles to make up for the relatively low secondary emission coefficient. DC discharges are challenging to simulate using PIC, due to the long time-scales involved and inherent two dimensional nature of such discharges.
The final report is available: report.pdf
Movies (.avi) of striations moving in a DC discharge (from XOOPIC) (may not be viewable on all systems):
My poster presentation for GEC2003 is also available. The theory of DC discharges, and PIC simulations of DC discharges and comparisons to theory. (pdf files may not be viewable/printable with all systems/viewers)
A new and ongoing area of investigation. A movie made in XOOPIC in MPEG1 format of a magnetized DC discharge may be seen here (14MB).
I've written a benchmarking script for XOOPIC. It is available here.
PREVIOUS WORK: Obtained a BS in mechanical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2000. Went on to work there as a graduate student researcher under Professor Gatsonis. The work included kinetic modeling of rarefied gas flows using the DSMC method on unstructured tetrahedral meshes. The DSMC code, originally by Valerie Tenishev, was improved through implementation of the variable hard sphere collision model and the discrete harmonic oscillator model for internal degrees of freedom. The grid generator, originally by Konstantin Kovalev, was also improved by the addition of heuristic mesh quality optimization based on the minimum dihedral angle of a tetrahedra. The DSMC program was also made into a collisionless particle in cell code using a special property of the Delaunay triangulation. Jeff was then fortunate enough to get accepted to UC Berkeley with the help of Professor Ned Birdsall, head of the Plasma Theory and Simulation Group.
Links to reseach activities:
useful programs:
Other useful links:
