Validation Overview

Helicon maintains a suite of physics validation tests against published experimental and numerical benchmarks.

Running All Validation Cases

helicon validate --all

Or from Python:

from helicon.validate.runner import run_all_validations

results = run_all_validations()
for name, result in results.items():
    status = "PASS" if result.passed else "FAIL"
    print(f"[{status}] {name}: {result.summary}")

Validation Cases

Case	Reference	Observable	Tolerance
Free Expansion	Andersen et al. (1969)	Velocity distribution	< 5% RMS
Merino-Ahedo	Merino & Ahedo (2011)	Detachment efficiency vs R_B	< 10%
VASIMR VX-200	Olsen et al. (2015)	Thrust, Isp	< 15%
Resistive Detachment	Dimov & Taskaev (2003)	Hall parameter threshold	within range

Validation Report

from helicon.validate.report import generate_html_report

generate_html_report(results, output_dir="docs/validation_results/")

HTML reports with field plots are saved to docs/validation_results/.

Adding Custom Validation Cases

Subclass ValidationCase:

from helicon.validate.base import ValidationCase, ValidationResult

class MyBenchmark(ValidationCase):
    name = "my_benchmark"
    reference = "Author et al. (2020)"

    def get_config(self):
        return SimConfig.from_yaml("benchmarks/my_case.yaml")

    def run(self, output_dir, dry_run=False):
        ...
        return ValidationResult(passed=True, summary="Error < 5%")