Introduction

pyFC is a module to construct “fractal cubes” that are useful for initial conditions in hydrodynamical simulations representing a dense, inhomogeneous component embedded in a more tenuous smooth background. Examples include clouds in earth’s athmosphere or the multiphase interstellar medium in galaxies.

Classes and functions are provided to create and visualize single-point lognormal, two-point fractal fields, statistics often associated with turbulent, dense condensations.

The method of creating lognormal “fractal cubes” was conceived by Lewis & Austin (2002) for the modeling of clouds in the earth’s atmosphere. The scheme of this code is based on that outlined in their paper.

Contents

• 1 Quickstart
  • 1.1 Requirements
  • 1.2 Installation
  • 1.3 Generating or loading a fractal cube
  • 1.4 Manipulating fractal cubes
  • 1.5 Visualizing fractal cubes
• 2 Fractal Cubes
  • 2.1 General Properties
  • 2.2 Lognormal Fractal Cubes
    • 2.2.1 Construction
  • 2.3 Gaussian Fractal Cubes
  • 2.4 Implementation in hydrodynamic simulations and generating porosity
    • 2.4.1 Simple example: Clouds in the interstellar medium
• 3 Demo scripts
• 4 API Reference
  • 4.1 Fractal Cube objects
  • 4.2 Utility functions
  • 4.3 Manipulation functions

Indices and tables

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page

License and Disclaimer

The code is free and open source under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), and comes without warranty. The content of this documentation is licensed under GNU Free Documentation License.