Solving Vlasov Equations Using NRxx Method

TL;DR

This paper introduces a moment method based on the NRxx framework to numerically solve Vlasov equations, enabling high-order approximations and accurate simulations of phenomena like Landau damping.

Contribution

It adapts the NRxx moment method with a new closure for the Vlasov equations, ensuring hyperbolicity and well-posedness for high-order expansions.

Findings

Accurately captures linear Landau damping across various parameters.

Demonstrates convergence of damping rate with grid refinement.

Maintains conservation of mass and momentum in simulations.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a moment method to numerically solve the Vlasov equations using the framework of the NRxx method developed in [6, 8, 7] for the Boltzmann equation. Due to the same convection term of the Boltzmann equation and the Vlasov equation, it is very convenient to use the moment expansion in the NRxx method to approximate the distribution function in the Vlasov equations. The moment closure recently presented in [5] is applied to achieve the globally hyperbolicity so that the local well-posedness of the moment system is attained. This makes our simulations using high order moment expansion accessible in the case of the distribution far away from the equilibrium which appears very often in the solution of the Vlasov equations. With the moment expansion of the distribution function, the acceleration in the velocity space results in an ordinary differential system of the macroscopic velocity, thus is easy to be handled. The numerical method we developed can keep both the mass and the momentum conserved. We carry out the simulations of both the Vlasov-Poisson equations and the Vlasov-Poisson-BGK equations to study the linear Landau damping. The numerical convergence is exhibited in terms of the moment number and the spatial grid size, respectively. The variation of discretized energy as well as the dependence of the recurrence time on moment order is investigated. The linear Landau damping is well captured for different wave numbers and collision frequencies. We find that the Landau damping rate linearly and monotonically converges in the spatial grid size. The results are in perfect agreement with the theoretic data in the collisionless case.