A STABLE, ACCURATE METHODOLOGY FOR HIGH MACH NUMBER, STRONG MAGNETIC FIELD MHD TURBULENCE WITH ADAPTIVE MESH REFINEMENT: RESOLUTION AND REFINEMENT STUDIES

Journal Article · Wed Feb 01 04:00:00 EST 2012 · Astrophysical Journal

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/745/2/139· OSTI ID:22011896

Li, Pak Shing; Klein, Richard I ^[1]; Martin, Daniel F ^[2]

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1. Astronomy Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)
2. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)

Performing a stable, long-duration simulation of driven MHD turbulence with a high thermal Mach number and a strong initial magnetic field is a challenge to high-order Godunov ideal MHD schemes because of the difficulty in guaranteeing positivity of the density and pressure. We have implemented a robust combination of reconstruction schemes, Riemann solvers, limiters, and constrained transport electromotive force averaging schemes that can meet this challenge, and using this strategy, we have developed a new adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) MHD module of the ORION2 code. We investigate the effects of AMR on several statistical properties of a turbulent ideal MHD system with a thermal Mach number of 10 and a plasma {beta}{sub 0} of 0.1 as initial conditions; our code is shown to be stable for simulations with higher Mach numbers (M{sub rms}= 17.3) and smaller plasma beta ({beta}{sub 0} = 0.0067) as well. Our results show that the quality of the turbulence simulation is generally related to the volume-averaged refinement. Our AMR simulations show that the turbulent dissipation coefficient for supersonic MHD turbulence is about 0.5, in agreement with unigrid simulations.

• OSTI ID: 22011896
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 745; ISSN ASJOAB; ISSN 0004-637X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
ASTROPHYSICS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
ELECTROMOTIVE FORCE
MACH NUMBER
MAGNETIC FIELDS
MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMICS
STARS
TURBULENCE