Efficient, Divergence-Free, High Order MHD on 3D Spherical Meshes with Optimal Geodesic Meshing

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-order, divergence-free MHD simulation method on 3D spherical geodesic meshes, integrating advanced algorithms for accurate, efficient astrophysical and space physics modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of high-order isoparametric mappings, divergence-free magnetic field reconstruction, and ADER time-stepping tailored for geodesic meshes in MHD simulations.

Findings

Achieves divergence-free magnetic field updates at all orders.

Demonstrates high accuracy through various tests.

Shows excellent parallel scalability on supercomputers.

Abstract

There is a great need in several areas of astrophysics and space-physics to carry out high order of accuracy, divergence-free MHD simulations on spherical meshes. This requires us to pay careful attention to the interplay between mesh quality and numerical algorithms. Methods have been designed that fundamentally integrate high order isoparametric mappings with the other high accuracy algorithms that are needed for divergence-free MHD simulations on geodesic meshes. The goal of this paper is to document such algorithms that are implemented in the geodesic mesh version of the RIEMANN code. The fluid variables are reconstructed using a special kind of WENO-AO algorithm that integrates the mesh geometry into the reconstruction process from the ground-up. A novel divergence-free reconstruction strategy for the magnetic field that performs efficiently at all orders, even on isoparametrically mapped meshes, is then presented. The MHD equations are evolved in space and time using a novel ADER predictor algorithm that is efficiently adapted to the isoparametrically mapped geometry. The application of one-dimensional and multidimensional Riemann solvers at suitable locations on the mesh then provides the corrector step. The corrector step for the magnetic field uses a Yee-type staggering of magnetic fields. This results in a scheme with divergence-free update for the magnetic field. The use of ADER enables a one-step update which only requires one messaging operation per complete timestep. This is very beneficial for parallel processing. Several accuracy tests are presented as are stringent test problems. PetaScale performance is also demonstrated on the largest available supercomputers.