No Arabic abstract
We present new methods to solve the Riemann problem both exactly and approximately for general equations of state (EoS) to facilitate realistic modeling and understanding of astrophysical flows. The existence and uniqueness of the new exact general EoS Riemann solution can be guaranteed if the EoS is monotone regardless of the physical validity of the EoS. We confirm that: (1) the solution of the new exact general EoS Riemann solver and the solution of the original exact Riemann solver match when calculating perfect gas Euler equations; (2) the solution of the new Harten-Lax-van Leer-Contact (HLLC) general EoS Riemann solver and the solution of the original HLLC Riemann solver match when working with perfect gas EoS; and (3) the solution of the new HLLC general EoS Riemann solver approaches the new exact solution. We solve the EoS with two methods, one is to interpolate 2D EoS tables by the bi-linear interpolation method, and the other is to analytically calculate thermodynamic variables at run-time. The interpolation method is more general as it can work with other monotone and realistic EoS while the analytic EoS solver introduced here works with a relatively idealized EoS. Numerical results confirm that the accuracy of the two EoS solvers is similar. We study the efficiency of these two methods with the HLLC general EoS Riemann solver and find that analytic EoS solver is faster in the test problems. However, we point out that a combination of the two EoS solvers may become favorable in some specific problems. Throughout this research, we assume local thermal equilibrium.
A discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method suitable for large-scale astrophysical simulations on Cartesian meshes as well as arbitrary static and moving Voronoi meshes is presented. Most major astrophysical fluid dynamics codes use a finite volume (FV) approach. We demonstrate that the DG technique offers distinct advantages over FV formulations on both static and moving meshes. The DG method is also easily generalized to higher than second-order accuracy without requiring the use of extended stencils to estimate derivatives (thereby making the scheme highly parallelizable). We implement the technique in the AREPO code for solving the fluid and the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations. By examining various test problems, we show that our new formulation provides improved accuracy over FV approaches of the same order, and reduces post-shock oscillations and artificial diffusion of angular momentum. In addition, the DG method makes it possible to represent magnetic fields in a locally divergence-free way, improving the stability of MHD simulations and moderating global divergence errors, and is a viable alternative for solving the MHD equations on meshes where Constrained-Transport (CT) cannot be applied. We find that the DG procedure on a moving mesh is more sensitive to the choice of slope limiter than is its FV method counterpart. Therefore, future work to improve the performance of the DG scheme even further will likely involve the design of optimal slope limiters. As presently constructed, our technique offers the potential of improved accuracy in astrophysical simulations using the moving mesh AREPO code as well as those employing adaptive mesh refinement (AMR).
A new Riemann solver is presented for the ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations with the so-called Boris correction. The Boris correction is applied to reduce wave speeds, avoiding an extremely small timestep in MHD simulations. The proposed Riemann solver, Boris-HLLD, is based on the HLLD solver. As done by the original HLLD solver, (1) the Boris-HLLD solver has four intermediate states in the Riemann fan when left and right states are given, (2) it resolves the contact discontinuity, Alfven waves, and fast waves, and (3) it satisfies all the jump conditions across shock waves and discontinuities except for slow shock waves. The results of a shock tube problem indicate that the scheme with the Boris-HLLD solver captures contact discontinuities sharply and it exhibits shock waves without any overshoot when using the minmod limiter. The stability tests show that the scheme is stable when $|u| lesssim 0.5c$ for a low Alfven speed ($V_A lesssim c$), where $u$, $c$, and $V_A$ denote the gas velocity, speed of light, and Alfven speed, respectively. For a high Alfven speed ($V_A gtrsim c$), where the plasma beta is relatively low in many cases, the stable region is large, $|u| lesssim (0.6-1) c$. We discuss the effect of the Boris correction on physical quantities using several test problems. The Boris-HLLD scheme can be useful for problems with supersonic flows in which regions with a very low plasma beta appear in the computational domain.
Due to increase in computing power, high-order Eulerian schemes will likely become instrumental for the simulations of turbulence and magnetic field amplification in astrophysical fluids in the next years. We present the implementation of a fifth order weighted essentially non-oscillatory scheme for constrained-transport magnetohydrodynamics into the code WOMBAT. We establish the correctness of our implementation with an extensive number tests. We find that the fifth order scheme performs as accurately as a common second order scheme at half the resolution. We argue that for a given solution quality the new scheme is more computationally efficient than lower order schemes in three dimensions. We also establish the performance characteristics of the solver in the WOMBAT framework. Our implementation fully vectorizes using flattened arrays in thread-local memory. It performs at about 0.6 Million zones per second per node on Intel Broadwell. We present scaling tests of the code up to 98 thousand cores on the Cray XC40 machine Hazel Hen, with a sustained performance of about 5 percent of peak at scale.
An accurate knowledge of the neutron capture cross sections of 62,63Ni is crucial since both isotopes take key positions which affect the whole reaction flow in the weak s process up to A=90. No experimental value for the 63Ni(n,gamma) cross section exists so far, and until recently the experimental values for 62Ni(n,gamma) at stellar temperatures (kT=30 keV) ranged between 12 and 37 mb. This latter discrepancy could now be solved by two activations with following AMS using the GAMS setup at the Munich tandem accelerator which are also in perfect agreement with a recent time-of-flight measurement. The resulting (preliminary) Maxwellian cross section at kT=30 keV was determined to be <sigma>30keV = 23.4 +/- 4.6 mb. Additionally, we have measured the 64Ni(gamma,n)63Ni cross section close to threshold. Photoactivations at 13.5 MeV, 11.4 MeV and 10.3 MeV were carried out with the ELBE accelerator at Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf. A first AMS measurement of the sample activated at 13.5 MeV revealed a cross section smaller by more than a factor of 2 compared to NON-SMOKER predictions.
Occurring in protoplanetary discs composed of dust and gas, streaming instabilities are a favoured mechanism to drive the formation of planetesimals. The Polydispserse Streaming Instability is a generalisation of the Streaming Instability to a continuum of dust sizes. This second paper in the series provides a more in-depth derivation of the governing equations and presents novel numerical methods for solving the associated linear stability problem. In addition to the direct discretisation of the eigenproblem at second order introduced in the previous paper, a new technique based on numerically reducing the system of integral equations to a complex polynomial combined with root finding is found to yield accurate results at much lower computational cost. A related method for counting roots of the dispersion relation inside a contour without locating those roots is also demonstrated. Applications of these methods show they can reproduce and exceed the accuracy of previous results in the literature, and new benchmark results are provided. Implementations of the methods described are made available in an accompanying Python package psitools.