Numerical Modeling of Weakly Ionized Plasmas

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics

Scientific paper

Rate now

  [ 0.00 ] – not rated yet Voters 0   Comments 0

Details

Scientific paper

Numerical investigations of astrophysical plasma flows often rely on the ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) approximation. In the case of weakly ionized plasmas the most questionable assumption of this is that the gas may be adequately approximated as a perfectly conducting single fluid. In direct consequence, the field lines are frozen into the bulk flow and may exert unrealistic forces on the gas in situations where magnetic diffusion should be important. A more appropriate treatment under these conditions is to discard the flux-freezing approximation by allowing charged species (i.e. electrons, ions, charge carrying dust grains) to have relative motions and compete in their interactions with the neutral gas component and the magnetic field. Taking such a multifluid approach admits ambipolar and Hall diffusion effects which can have a significant influence on the dynamics of the plasma.
Conventional explicit numerical schemes have been shown to have a vanishing stable time step limit as the Hall effect becomes large and implicit schemes are, by nature, difficult to implement on distributed architectures, particularly when adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is used. We present a novel explicit numerical scheme which allows a very significant claw-back of the deficit in efficiency when compared with implicit techniques. In addition, given that the scheme is explicit, it is straightforward to plug into existing AMR packages.

No associations

LandOfFree

Say what you really think

Search LandOfFree.com for scientists and scientific papers. Rate them and share your experience with other people.

Rating

Numerical Modeling of Weakly Ionized Plasmas does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Numerical Modeling of Weakly Ionized Plasmas, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Numerical Modeling of Weakly Ionized Plasmas will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

     

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1241241

  Search
All data on this website is collected from public sources. Our data reflects the most accurate information available at the time of publication.