A new thermodynamically compatible finite volume scheme for magnetohydrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel finite volume scheme for magnetohydrodynamics that is thermodynamically compatible, ensuring stability and entropy consistency, with divergence cleaning for magnetic fields, and demonstrates its effectiveness on benchmark problems.

Contribution

It develops a thermodynamically compatible finite volume scheme for MHD that discretizes the entropy inequality directly, ensuring stability and energy conservation.

Findings

Scheme satisfies a discrete entropy inequality by construction

Ensures nonlinear stability in the energy norm

Achieves good results on standard MHD benchmarks

Abstract

In this paper we propose a novel thermodynamically compatible finite volume scheme for the numerical solution of the equations of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) in one and two space dimensions. As shown by Godunov in 1972, the MHD system can be written as overdetermined symmetric hyperbolic and thermodynamically compatible (SHTC) system. More precisely, the MHD equations are symmetric hyperbolic in the sense of Friedrichs and satisfy the first and second principles of thermodynamics. In a more recent work on SHTC systems, \cite{Rom1998}, the entropy density is a primary evolution variable, and total energy conservation can be shown to be a \textit{consequence} that is obtained after a judicious linear combination of all other evolution equations. The objective of this paper is to mimic the SHTC framework also on the discrete level by directly discretizing the \textit{entropy inequality}, instead of the total energy conservation law, while total energy conservation is obtained via an appropriate linear combination as a \textit{consequence} of the thermodynamically compatible discretization of all other evolution equations. As such, the proposed finite volume scheme satisfies a discrete cell entropy inequality \textit{by construction} and can be proven to be nonlinearly stable in the energy norm due to the discrete energy conservation. In multiple space dimensions the divergence-free condition of the magnetic field is taken into account via a new thermodynamically compatible generalized Lagrangian multiplier (GLM) divergence cleaning approach. The fundamental properties of the scheme proposed in this paper are mathematically rigorously proven. The new method is applied to some standard MHD benchmark problems in one and two space dimensions, obtaining good results in all cases.