Particles in Box is a desktop program designed to demonstrate the behavior of gas particles in an enclosed area (a box). This project is curated by a National Research University of Electronic Technology professor Gennady Gaidukov.
Particle in Box stores experiment-related information in a binary file structured by the following rules:
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The first 72 bytes are the settings
- Number of particles created within the left part of the box (4-byte integer)
- Number of particles created within the right part of the box (4-byte integer)
- Initial speed of particles (4-byte float)
- Speed loss factor (4-byte float)
- Speed change after collision with the top of the box (4-byte float)
- Speed change after collision with the sides of the box (4-byte float)
- Speed change after collision with the bottom of the box (4-byte float)
- The free-fall acceleration (g) (4-byte float)
- Box width (4-byte float)
- Box height (4-byte float)
- Barrier X position (4-byte float)
- Barrier width (4-byte float)
- Hole Y position (4-byte float)
- Hole height (4-byte float)
- Particle radius (4-byte float)
- Frames per second (4-byte int)
- Experiment length in minutes (4-byte int)
- Random seed (4-byte int)
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The rest of the file consists of particle data at a fixed point in time. This data comes in chunks of fixed size (which depends on particle count).
The structure is as follows:
- Timestamp (microseconds passed since the start of the simulation) (8-byte long)
- State of each particle at the given moment of time
- ID (4-byte integer)
- X coordinate (8-byte double)
- Y coordinate (8-byte double)
- Velocity X coordinate (8-byte double)
- Velocity Y component (8-byte double)
Hence, the size of each data chunk can be calculated using a simple formula
Size = (8 + N * 36) Bytes, where N is the total particle count.