Section: New Results

Genuinely multidimensional Riemann Solver

Participants : Jeaniffer Vides, Boniface Nkonga.

Multidimensional Riemann solvers were pioneered by Abgrall. Abgrall, Maire, Nkonga, Després and Loubere have extensively developed them especially as node-solvers for Lagrangian hydrodynamics. Another strain of work comes from explorations by Wendroff and Balsara who took a space-time approach. In this work, the resolved state is obtained via space-time integration over a wave model, just as was done by Wendroff and Balsara. However, an algebraic approach is used for the development of the fluxes. It is, therefore, shown that the multidimensional fluxes can be obtained by application of jump conditions at the boundaries of the wave model. The problem is of course over determined with the result that the shock jump conditions are only satisfied approximately in a least squares sense. Even so, this work gives us new perspective on multidimensional Riemann solvers. The literal satisfaction of the shock jump conditions (up to least squares approximation) makes it easier to understand multidimensional Riemann solvers as a natural extension of the one-dimensional Riemann solvers. Contributions have also been made on the development of a minimalist wave model, which might help in reducing dissipation. Further innovations are reported on the assembling of fluxes based on the structure of the wave model, and those innovations are potentially useful. For MHD the CT approach consists of constraining the transport of magnetic field so that the divergence is always kept zero. The method relies on exploiting the dualism between the flux components and the electric field. Since the electric field is needed at the edges of the mesh, the multidimensional Riemann solver can also provide the electric field. By running an extensive set of simulations, it is shown that the multidimensional Riemann solver is robust and can be used to obtain divergence-free formulations for MHD that perform well on several stringent calculations. The work performed this year was to improve this strategy by enriching of sub-structures the description of the strongly interaction of waves. These improvements were done in collaboration with the invited professor D. Balsara. This work has resulted in an article to be published in the Journal of Computational Physics in 2016.