The virtual element method for the coupled system of magneto-hydrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper reviews the application of the Virtual Element Method (VEM) to magneto-hydrodynamics, demonstrating divergence-free magnetic fields, effective linearization strategies, and numerical experiments on magnetic reconnection.

Contribution

It introduces a novel VEM discretization for coupled MHD systems that ensures divergence-free magnetic fields and analyzes the linear systems involved.

Findings

VEM produces divergence-free magnetic fields in MHD simulations.

The linearization strategy leads to well-posed saddle point problems.

Numerical experiments show good convergence and resolution in magnetic reconnection scenarios.

Abstract

In this work, we review the framework of the Virtual Element Method (VEM) for a model in magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD), that incorporates a coupling between electromagnetics and fluid flow, and allows us to construct novel discretizations for simulating realistic phenomenon in MHD. First, we study two chains of spaces approximating the electromagnetic and fluid flow components of the model. Then, we show that this VEM approximation will yield divergence free discrete magnetic fields, an important property in any simulation in MHD. We present a linearization strategy to solve the VEM approximation which respects the divergence free condition on the magnetic field. This linearization will require that, at each non-linear iteration, a linear system be solved. We study these linear systems and show that they represent well-posed saddle point problems. We conclude by presenting numerical experiments exploring the performance of the VEM applied to the subsystem describing the electromagnetics. The first set of experiments provide evidence regarding the speed of convergence of the method as well as the divergence-free condition on the magnetic field. In the second set we present a model for magnetic reconnection in a mesh that includes a series of hanging nodes, which we use to calibrate the resolution of the method. The magnetic reconnection phenomenon happens near the center of the domain where the mesh resolution is finer and high resolution is achieved.