No Arabic abstract
MHD turbulence is likely to play an important role in several astrophysical scenarios where the magnetic Reynolds is very large. Numerically, these cases can be studied efficiently by means of Large Eddy Simulations, in which the computational resources are used to evolve the system only up to a finite grid size. The resolution is not fine enough to capture all the relevant small-scale physics at play, which is instead effectively modeled by a set of additional terms in the evolution equations, dubbed as sub-grid-scale model. Here we extend such approach, commonly used in non-relativistic/non-magnetic/incompressible fluid dynamics, applying the so-called gradient model to a general set of balance-law equations, that includes the relevant case in which a non-trivial inversion of conserved to primitive fields is needed. In particular, we focus on the relativistic compressible ideal MHD scenario, providing for the first time (and for any equation of state) all the additional sub-grid-scale terms. As an application, we consider box simulations of the relativistic Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, which is also the first mechanism responsible for the magnetic field amplification in binary neutron star mergers and cannot yet be fully captured by the finest-grid and longest simulations available. The performance of our model is numerically assessed by comparing it to the residuals arising from the filtering of high-resolution simulations. We find that the model can fit very well those residuals from resolutions a few times higher. Although the application shown here explicitly considers the Minkowski metric, it can be directly extended to general relativity, thus settling the basis to implement the gradient sub-grid model in a GRMHD binary merger. Our results suggest that this approach will be potentially able to unveil much better the small-scale dynamics achievable in full GRMHD simulations.
The detection of binary neutron star mergers represents one of the most important astrophysical discoveries of the recent years. Due to the extreme matter and gravity conditions and the rich dynamics developed, it becomes a tremendous challenge to accurately simulate numerically all the scales present during the collision. Here we present how to study such systems by using large eddy simulations with a self-consistent subgrid-scale gradient model, that we generalized to the special relativistic case in a previous work and now extend to the general relativistic case. Adapted from nonrelativistic scenarios, the so-called gradient model allows to capture part of the effects of the hidden dynamics on the resolved scales, by means of a physically-agnostic, mathematically-based Taylor expansion of the nonlinear terms in the conservative evolution equations fluxes. We assess the validity of this approach in bounding-box simulations of the magnetic Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. Several resolutions and a broad range of scenarios are considered in order to carefully test the performance of the model under three crucial aspects: (i) highly curved backgrounds, (ii) jumps on the fluid density profiles and (iii) strong shocks. The results suggest our extension of the gradient subgrid-scale model to general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics is a promising approach for studying binary neutron stars mergers, and potentially to other relevant astrophysical scenarios.
We discuss the relation between the output of Newtonian N-body simulations on scales that approach or exceed the particle horizon to the description of General Relativity. At leading order, the Zeldovich approximation is correct on large scales, coinciding with the General Relativistic result. At second order in the initial metric potential, the trajectories of particles deviate from the second order Newtonian result and hence the validity of 2LPT initial conditions should be reassessed when used in very large simulations. We also advocate using the expression for the synchronous gauge density as a well behaved measure of density fluctuations on such scales.
In General Relativity, the constraint equation relating metric and density perturbations is inherently nonlinear, leading to an effective non-Gaussianity in the dark matter density field on large scales - even if the primordial metric perturbation is Gaussian. Intrinsic non-Gaussianity in the large-scale dark matter overdensity in GR is real and physical. However, the variance smoothed on a local physical scale is not correlated with the large-scale curvature perturbation, so that there is no relativistic signature in the galaxy bias when using the simplest model of bias. It is an open question whether the observable mass proxies such as luminosity or weak lensing correspond directly to the physical mass in the simple halo bias model. If not, there may be observables that encode this relativistic signature.
In this work the accuracy of the Actuator Line Model (ALM) in Large Eddy Simulations of wind turbine flow is studied under the specific conditions of very coarse spatial resolutions. For finely-resolved conditions, it is known that ALM provides better accuracy compared to the standard Actuator Disk Model (ADM) without rotation. However, we show here that on very coarse resolutions, flow induction occurring at rotor scales can affect the predicted inflow angle and can adversely affect the ALM predictions. We first provide an illustration of coarse LES to reproduce wind tunnel measurements. The resulting flow predictions are good, but the challenges in predicting power outputs from the detailed ALM motivate more detailed analysis on a case with uniform inflow. We present a theoretical framework to compare the filtered quantities that enter the Large-Eddy Simulation equations as body forces with a scaling relation between the filtered and unfiltered quantities. The study aims to apply the theoretical derivation to the simulation framework and improve the current results for an ALM, especially in the near wake where the largest differences are observed.
A new method for the localization of the regions where small scale turbulent fluctuations are present in hypersonic flows is applied to the large-eddy simulation (LES) of a compressible turbulent jet with an initial Mach number equal to 5. The localization method used is called selective LES and is based on the exploitation of a scalar probe function $f$ which represents the magnitude of the stretching-tilting term of the vorticity equation normalized with the enstrophy (Tordella et al. 2007). For a fully developed turbulent field of fluctuations, statistical analysis shows that the probability that $f$ is larger than 2 is almost zero, and, for any given threshold, it is larger if the flow is under-resolved. By computing the spatial field of $f$ in each instantaneous realization of the simulation it is possible to locate the regions where the magnitude of the normalized vortical stretching-tilting is anomalously high. The sub-grid model is then introduced into the governing equations in such regions only. The results of the selective LES simulation are compared with those of a standard LES, where the sub-grid terms are used in the whole domain, and with those of a standard Euler simulation with the same resolution. The comparison is carried out by assuming as reference field a higher resolution Euler simulation of the same jet. It is shown that the selective LES modifies the dynamic properties of the flow to a lesser extent with respect to the classical LES. In particular, the prediction of the enstrophy, mean velocity and density distributions and of the energy and density spectra are substantially improved.