This is the README for the PLONS PLOtting tool for Nice Simulations. PLONS can be used to read in and analyse data of hydrodynamical simulations with the SPH code PHANTOM (Price et al. 2018). This python package is currently tailored to single, binary and triple AGB wind models. For a more detailed explanation of how to use PLONS, see (readthedocs).

This tool is complementary to the SPH visualisation tool SPLASH (Price 2007), but can be analysed more toroughly with PLONS.

PLONS pipeline

PLONS contains a pipeline that produces useful output files with information about your simulation, and currently contains the following functionalities:

1. 2D slice plots showing the density, temperature and velocity distribution of the last full dump of the model.​

2. 1D line plots (radial structure) of the global structure of the last dump of the model along the x-, y- and z-axes.​

3. Information and plots of the orbital evolution​

4. 1D spherical profiles, which are useful for single star models

To run this pipeline, use the script 'main.py' in plons/scripts/ . To select a certain model and option, you can execute this script as python main.py -m ... -o ... (and filling in the model and option number instead of the ...).

Source file functions and example notebooks

Next to the functionalities included in the pipeline, you can use Plons for more detailed analysises using the functions defined in the source files (in plons/src/plons/). Examples of how to use these functions can be found in some example notebooks (in docs/src/1_examples/), describing a more thorough analysis that makes use of line slices and sliceplots (/0_creating_figures_package), and an analysis of accretion disks around the companion (/2_accretion_disk).

Reading in PHANTOM data

PHANTOM returns different types of useful data files. Every certain timestep during the evolution of the model, dump files are output, typically named e.g. as 'wind_xxxxx'. These files contain relevant data (such as position, velocity, mass, density, energy, temperature) of the SPH particles in the model at a certain timestep. The last 'x' rows in these datafiles correspond to the 'x' sink particles in the model. Further, for every run, evolutionary '*.ev' are produced that contain information about the time evolution of usefull quantities such as the mass of a sink particle for example.