2019/03/11 by William Tsubasa Taitano, Luis Chacon, Taitano, William Tsubasa +5
Physics and Astronomy · #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Plasma Physics (physics.plasm-ph) #physics.comp-ph #physics.plasm-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1903.05467
31 pages, 12 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1709.04502
arxiv created 2019/03/11 · arxiv updated 2019/03/14
We develop a conservative phase-space grid-adaptivity strategy for the Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation in a planar geometry. The velocity-space grid is normalized to the thermal speed and shifted by the bulk-fluid velocity. The configuration-space grid is moved according to a mesh-motion-partial-differential equation (MMPDE), which equidistributes a monitor function that is inversely proportional to the gradient-length scales of the macroscopic plasma quantities. The grid adaptation ensures discrete conservation of the collisional invariants (mass, momentum, and energy). The conservative grid-adaptivity strategy provides an efficient scheme which resolves important physical structures in the phase-space while controlling the computational complexity at all times. We demonstrate the favorable features of the proposed algorithm through a set of test cases of increasing complexity.