A nonlinear structural subgrid-scale closure for compressible MHD Part I: derivation and energy dissipation properties

TL;DR

This paper develops a new nonlinear structural subgrid-scale closure model for compressible MHD turbulence in large eddy simulations, capable of capturing energy transfer and anisotropy effects across various regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a flow-agnostic, nonlinear closure based on gradient expansion, applicable from subsonic to hyper-sonic and Alfvénic regimes, improving modeling of compressible MHD turbulence.

Findings

Supports spectral energy cascades in multiple directions

Implicitly accounts for flow anisotropy

Validated against diverse turbulence data

Abstract

Compressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence is ubiquitous in astrophysical phenomena ranging from the intergalactic to the stellar scales. In studying them, numerical simulations are nearly inescapable, due to the large degree of nonlinearity involved. However the dynamical ranges of these phenomena are much larger than what is computationally accessible. In large eddy simulations (LES), the resulting limited resolution effects are addressed explicitly by introducing to the equations of motion additional terms associated with the unresolved, subgrid-scale (SGS) dynamics. This renders the system unclosed. We derive a set of nonlinear structural closures for the ideal MHD LES equations with particular emphasis on the effects of compressibility. The closures are based on a gradient expansion of the finite-resolution operator (W.K. Yeo CUP 1993, ed. Galperin & Orszag) and require no assumptions about the nature of the flow or magnetic field. Thus the scope of their applicability ranges from the sub- to the hyper-sonic and -Alfvenic regimes. The closures support spectral energy cascades both up and down-scale, as well as direct transfer between kinetic and magnetic resolved and unresolved energy budgets. They implicitly take into account the local geometry, and in particular the anisotropy, of the flow. Their properties are $\textit{a priori}$ validated in an accompanying article (Grete et al. Phys. Plasmas, 2016) against alternative closures available in the literature with respect to a wide range of simulation data of homogeneous and isotropic turbulence.