The plates were hooked together with copper wires, 5.25mm in cross-section. This model illustrates the global nature of the circuit and the strongly-coupled nature of the charges. In one portion of the circuit, the current must flow in the opposite direction of the dipole electric field of the capacitor. See Fig. 8 and Sec. The circuit is divided into cubic computational cells 0.25mm on a side, and contains approximately cells.
Any excess charge is assumed to reside in the center of each cell.
This simple technique also means that freshman physics students can understand how the calculations were performed. This very small time was chosen so the fractional change in the charge of a cell was small, typically less than one percent. The calculation is started by placing on the inner faces of the capacitor, with the rest of the circuit neutral. The program makes a loop over all the cells in the circuit, calculating the electric field on each cell face and moving charges based on that field and the conductivity. The process is then repeated with the new charge configuration.