A Novel High-Order, Entropy Stable, 3D AMR MHD Solver with Guaranteed Positive Pressure

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-order, entropy stable 3D MHD solver with adaptive mesh refinement that guarantees positive pressure and effectively handles strong discontinuities, improving accuracy and robustness in complex flow simulations.

Contribution

A novel entropy stable MHD solver with guaranteed positive pressure, supporting divergence-free magnetic fields and integrated into the FLASH AMR code.

Findings

Demonstrates high accuracy and robustness through various tests.

Shows improved handling of strong discontinuities.

Achieves computational efficiency in complex simulations.

Abstract

We describe a high-order numerical magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) solver built upon a novel non-linear entropy stable numerical flux function that supports eight travelling wave solutions. By construction the solver conserves mass, momentum, and energy and is entropy stable. The method is designed to treat the divergence-free constraint on the magnetic field in a similar fashion to a hyperbolic divergence cleaning technique. The solver described herein is especially well-suited for flows involving strong discontinuities. Furthermore, we present a new formulation to guarantee positivity of the pressure. We present the underlying theory and implementation of the new solver into the multi-physics, multi-scale adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) simulation code $\texttt{FLASH}$ (http://flash.uchicago.edu). The accuracy, robustness and computational efficiency is demonstrated with a number of tests, including comparisons to available MHD implementations in $\texttt{FLASH}$.