Efficient particle locator for unstructured-grid PIC simulations

An efficient particle locator for particle-in-cell simulations on unstructured grids is presented. It is inspired by computational efficiency when particle attributes such as position and velocity are updated during the particle push step of the simulations. It requires minimal computing resources particularly when particles travel near any nodes (vertices) of the grids. In addition, all connectivity information among grid elements is stored into the so-called intelligent mesh (i-mesh) in order to facilitate locating particles. The i-mesh is motivated by the need for instant giving of the adjacent cells. The new algorithm for the particle locator together with the i-mesh can result in efficient computation.