High Order Asymptotic Preserving Finite Difference WENO Schemes with Constrained Transport for MHD Equations in All Sonic Mach Number


Wei Chen, Xiamen University


In classical fluid dynamic problems, one faces both situations in which the flow is subsonic, and consequently acoustic waves are very fast compared to the velocity of the fluid, and situations in which the fluid moves at high speed and compressibility may generate shock waves. Standard explicit fluid solvers such as Godunov method fail in the description of both flows due to time step restrictions caused by the stiffness of the equations which leads to prohibitive computational costs. I will talk about a high-order semi-implicit (SI) asymptotic preserving (AP) and divergence-free finite difference weighted essentially nonoscillatory (WENO) scheme for magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations. The sonic Mach number \epsilon ranging from 0 to \mathcal{O}(1). High-order accuracy in time is obtained by SI implicit-explicit Runge–Kutta (IMEX-RK) time discretization. High-order accuracy in space is achieved by finite difference WENO schemes with characteristic-wise reconstructions. A constrained transport method is applied to maintain a discrete divergence-free condition. The scheme is AP and asymptotic accuracy (AA) in the incompressible MHD limit is obtained if the implicit part of the SI IMEX-RK scheme is stiffly accurate. Numerical experiments are provided to validate the AP, AA, and divergence-free properties of our proposed approach. Besides, the scheme can well capture discontinuities such as shocks in an essentially non-oscillatory fashion in the compressible regime, while it is also a good incompressible solver with uniform large-time step conditions in the low sonic Mach limit. This is a joint work with Prof. Kailiang Wu and Prof. Tao Xiong.