An Exact Integration Scheme for Radiative Cooling in Hydrodynamical Simulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces an exact integration scheme for radiative cooling in hydrodynamical simulations, improving accuracy over traditional methods while maintaining competitive computational efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel exact integration method for radiative cooling, enhancing accuracy in hydrodynamical simulations compared to existing explicit and implicit schemes.

Findings

Outperforms traditional schemes in accuracy

Maintains competitive execution speed

Validated with radiative shock benchmark calculations

Abstract

A new scheme for incorporating radiative cooling in hydrodynamical codes is presented, centered around exact integration of the governing semi-discrete cooling equation. Using benchmark calculations based on the cooling downstream of a radiative shock, I demonstrate that the new scheme outperforms traditional explicit and implicit approaches in terms of accuracy, while remaining competitive in terms of execution speed.