e-field-sim

The program simulates the normalized electric vector field given an input of a variable number of point charges. It uses Coulumb's law in vector form to calculate a three dimensional direction vector at each point of a specific grid resolution. This resolution can be varied in code.

For better overview, the alpha channel can be manipulated based on the standardized magnitude calculation before the normalization. The following plot can be enabled in the code (mag_plot = True).

Calculations

For every point charge in the simulation the force vector at a specific point on the grid acting on a standardized test charge is calculated using:

$$\vec{E}(\vec{r}) = q \cdot \frac{\vec{r}}{|\vec{r}|^{3}}$$

Where $$\vec{r}$$ is the vector from the current point charge to the grid point and $$q$$ is the electric charge of the point charge. (In the case of the simulation: $q = -1~C \equiv "-"$ and $q = 1~C \equiv "+" \rightarrow$ magnitude can be ignored because of normalization)

The force vectors to every point charge from one point on the grid are added together resulting in the final vector for this point in space. This vector then gets normalized.