Three-dimensional magnetic field enhancement in a liner implosionsystem

The magnetic field enhancement is calculated for a magnetically imploded liner system that has flux excluding radial vanes. For the thinnest vane tested the field is found to concentrate at the vanes to a maximum value of almost three times its ambient value with a corresponding temperature increase well above the melting point. These values are calculated using the three-dimensional magnetohydrodgnamic code, MACH3. Calculations are performed for three vane thicknesses, and the vane movement is estimated. A bound is established on the design specification of the vanes based the disruption of current delivery to the liner due to the movement of the vanes     

Modeling open boundaries in dissipative MHD simulation

The truncation of large physical domains to concentrate computational resources is necessary or desirable in simulating many natural and man-made plasma phenomena. Three open boundary condition (BC) methods for such domain truncation of dissipative magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) problems are described and compared here. A novel technique, lacuna-based open boundary conditions (LOBC), is presented for applying open BC to dissipative MHD and other hyperbolic and mixed hyperbolic-parabolic systems of partial differential equations. LOBC, based on manipulating Calderon-type near-boundary sources, essentially damp hyperbolic effects in an exterior region attached to the simulation domain and apply BC appropriate for the remaining parabolic effects (if present) at the exterior region boundary. Another technique, approximate Riemann BC (ARBC), is adapted from finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin methods. In ARBC, the value of incoming flux is specified using a local, characteristic-based method. A third commonly-used open BC, zero-normal derivative BC (ZND BC), is presented for comparison. These open BC are tested in several gas dynamics and dissipative MHD problems. LOBC are found to give stable, low-reflection solutions even in the presence of strong parabolic behavior, while ARBC are stable only when hyperbolic behavior is dominant. Pros and cons of the techniques are discussed and put into context within the body of open BC research to date.     

A priori mesh quality metric error analysis applied to a high-order finite element method

Characterization of computational mesh’s quality prior to performing a numerical simulation is an important step in insuring that the result is valid. A highly distorted mesh can result in significant errors. It is therefore desirable to predict solution accuracy on a given mesh. The HiFi/SEL high-order finite element code is used to study the effects of various mesh distortions on solution quality of known analytic problems for spatial discretizations with different order of finite elements. The measured global error norms are compared to several mesh quality metrics by independently varying both the degree of the distortions and the order of the finite elements. It is found that the spatial spectral convergence rates are preserved for all considered distortion types, while the total error increases with the degree of distortion. For each distortion type, correlations between the measured solution error and the different mesh metrics are quantified, identifying the most appropriate overall mesh metric. The results show promise for future a priori computational mesh quality determination and improvement.     

An Implicit Scheme for Nonideal Magnetohydrodynamics

A new implicit algorithm is developed for solving the time-dependent, nonideal magnetohydrodynamic equations. It can also be used as an efficient relaxation scheme for steady state solutions. The algorithm is a finite-volume scheme that uses an approximate Riemann solver for the hyperbolic fluxes and central differencing applied on nested control volumes for the parabolic fluxes that arise from the non-ideal terms (i.e., resistivity and viscosity). In one dimension the scheme is second-order accurate in space and time. In two or three dimensions, the accuracy is between first and second order. For the class of problems considered, the implicit formulation is stable for any size time step, thus allowing efficient tracking of slower transients. The implicit operator is inverted using a lower–upper symmetric Gauss–Seidel iteration. Results from several test cases are presented that show good agreement with analytical solutions and illustrate the advantages of the scheme.