English

Constrained hyperbolic divergence cleaning in smoothed particle magnetohydrodynamics with variable cleaning speeds

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2016-07-18 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics Astrophysics of Galaxies Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

We present an updated constrained hyperbolic/parabolic divergence cleaning algorithm for smoothed particle magnetohydrodynamics (SPMHD) that remains conservative with wave cleaning speeds which vary in space and time. This is accomplished by evolving the quantity ψ/ch\psi / c_h instead of ψ\psi. Doing so allows each particle to carry an individual wave cleaning speed, chc_h, that can evolve in time without needing an explicit prescription for how it should evolve, preventing circumstances which we demonstrate could lead to runaway energy growth related to variable wave cleaning speeds. This modification requires only a minor adjustment to the cleaning equations and is trivial to adopt in existing codes. Finally, we demonstrate that our constrained hyperbolic/parabolic divergence cleaning algorithm, run for a large number of iterations, can reduce the divergence of the field to an arbitrarily small value, achieving B=0\nabla \cdot B=0 to machine precision.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.02394,
  title  = {Constrained hyperbolic divergence cleaning in smoothed particle magnetohydrodynamics with variable cleaning speeds},
  author = {Terrence S. Tricco and Daniel J. Price and Matthew R. Bate},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.02394},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

23 pages, 16 figures, accepted for publication in Journal of Computational Physics