PLPAK

Package for Low Temperature Plasma Kinetics : https://github.com/ptroyen/PLPAK

PLPAK is a library built for zero-dimensional analysis of plasma-kinetic systems based on provided reaction mechanism set. For non-equilibrium reactions multiple temperatures might be required to specify the rates of reactions and on top of that rate equations for energy exchanges in different modes are also essential. PLPAK is built to streamline the process of building such reaction systems, testing them and solving them.

Usage

If you utilize the package in your research, please cite the following papers:

• Pokharel, S., & Tropina, A. (2025). Characteristics of Femtosecond Laser Induced Filament and Energy Coupling by Nanosecond Laser Pulse in Air (arXiv:2502.00875). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.00875
• Pokharel, S., & Tropina, A. A. (2023). Self-consistent model and numerical approach for laser-induced non-equilibrium plasma. Journal of Applied Physics, 134(22), 223301. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0175177

Contact Details

• Sagar Pokharel : pokharel_sagar@tamu.edu / pokharelsagar1015@gmail.com
• Albina Tropina : atropina@tamu.edu

Installation

• Tested on the following

  • Python 3.9.20
  • Cantera==2.6.0
  • matplotlib==3.9.2
  • Scipy and Sympy (for full functionality)

• Clone the repository or download the zip file.

• Add path to the directory containing the package to the environment variable and import.

  dir_plpak = os.path.dirname("path_to/PLPAK/src/plpak")
  sys.path.append(dir_plpak)
  import PLPAK as pl

More Details

For more details, see the src/readme.md.

Example Usage

For a detailed example, check out the examples.

Directory Structure

• src/ contains the source code for the package.
• example/ contains examples of how to use the package and relevant .py script to load the library and run the simulations.
• data/ contains the data files required for the examples. Reaction mechanisms for $N_2$-plasma and experimental data for comparison are included. Please contact developers for use of air-plasma model.

Test

• Run the example/solveWithMech.py to run the simulation and save the data.

• The comparison of simulated results against experiments of Paper

  

  Figure: Comparison of Models

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research under Grant No. N00014-22-1-2235