Modeling anisotropic diffusion using a departure from isotropy approach

There are a large number of finite volume solvers available for solution of isotropic diffusion equation. This article presents an approach of adapting these solvers to solve anisotropic diffusion equations. The formulation works by decomposing the diffusive flux into a component associated with isotropic diffusion and another component associated with departure from isotropic diffusion. This results in an isotropic diffusion equation with additional terms to account for the anisotropic effect. These additional terms are treated using a deferred correction approach and coupled via an iterative procedure. The presented approach is validated against various diffusion problems in anisotropic media with known analytical or numerical solutions. Although demonstrated for two-dimensional problems, extension of the present approach to three-dimensional problems is straight forward. Other than the finite volume method, this approach can be applied to any discretization method

High-Resolution Mathematical and Numerical Analysis of Involution-Constrained PDEs

Partial differential equations constrained by involutions provide the highest fidelity mathematical models for a large number of complex physical systems of fundamental interest in critical scientific and technological disciplines. The applications described by these models include electromagnetics, continuum dynamics of solid media, and general relativity. This workshop brought together pure and applied mathematicians to discuss current research that cuts across these various disciplines’ boundaries. The presented material illuminated fundamental issues as well as evolving theoretical and algorithmic approaches for PDEs with involutions. The scope of the material covered was broad, and the discussions conducted during the workshop were lively and far-reaching

Three discontinuous Galerkin schemes for the anisotropic heat conduction equation on non-aligned grids

We present and discuss three discontinuous Galerkin (dG) discretizations for the anisotropic heat conduction equation on non-aligned cylindrical grids. Our most favourable scheme relies on a self-adjoint local dG (LDG) discretization of the elliptic operator. It conserves the energy exactly and converges with arbitrary order. The pollution by numerical perpendicular heat fluxes degrades with superconvergence rates. We compare this scheme with aligned schemes that are based on the flux-coordinate independent approach for the discretization of parallel derivatives. Here, the dG method provides the necessary interpolation. The first aligned discretization can be used in an explicit time-integrator. However, the scheme violates conservation of energy and shows up stagnating convergence rates for very high resolutions. We overcome this partly by using the adjoint of the parallel derivative operator to construct a second self-adjoint aligned scheme. This scheme preserves energy, but reveals unphysical oscillations in the numerical tests, which result in a decreased order of convergence. Both aligned schemes exhibit low numerical heat fluxes into the perpendicular direction. We build our argumentation on various numerical experiments on all three schemes for a general axisymmetric magnetic field, which is closed by a comparison to the aligned finite difference (FD) schemes of References [1,2

Finite-difference schemes for anisotropic diffusion

In fusion plasmas diffusion tensors are extremely anisotropic due to the high temperature and large magnetic field strength. This causes diffusion, heat conduction, and viscous momentum loss, to effectively be aligned with the magnetic field lines. This alignment leads to different values for the respective diffusive coefficients in the magnetic field direction and in the perpendicular direction, to the extent that heat diffusion coefficients can be up to 10 to the 12 th times larger in the parallel direction than in the perpendicular direction. This anisotropy puts stringent requirements on the numerical methods used to approximate the MHD-equations since any misalignment of the grid may cause the perpendicular diffusion to be polluted by the numerical error in approximating the parallel diffusion. Currently the common approach is to apply magnetic field-aligned coordinates, an approach that automatically takes care of the directionality of the diffusive coefficients. This approach runs into problems at x-points and at points where there is magnetic re-connection, since this causes local non-alignment. It is therefore useful to consider numerical schemes that are tolerant to the misalignment of the grid with the magnetic field lines, both to improve existing methods and to help open the possibility of applying regular non-aligned grids. To investigate this, in this paper several discretisation schemes are developed and applied to the anisotropic heat diffusion equation on a non-aligned grid.</p

A mimetic finite difference based quasi-static magnetohydrodynamic solver for force-free plasmas in tokamak disruptions

Force-free plasmas are a good approximation where the plasma pressure is tiny compared with the magnetic pressure, which is the case during the cold vertical displacement event (VDE) of a major disruption in a tokamak. On time scales long compared with the transit time of Alfven waves, the evolution of a force-free plasma is most efficiently described by the quasi-static magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model, which ignores the plasma inertia. Here we consider a regularized quasi-static MHD model for force-free plasmas in tokamak disruptions and propose a mimetic finite difference (MFD) algorithm. The full geometry of an ITER-like tokamak reactor is treated, with a blanket module region, a vacuum vessel region, and the plasma region. Specifically, we develop a parallel, fully implicit, and scalable MFD solver based on PETSc and its DMStag data structure for the discretization of the five-field quasi-static perpendicular plasma dynamics model on a 3D structured mesh. The MFD spatial discretization is coupled with a fully implicit DIRK scheme. The algorithm exactly preserves the divergence-free condition of the magnetic field under the resistive Ohm's law. The preconditioner employed is a four-level fieldsplit preconditioner, which is created by combining separate preconditioners for individual fields, that calls multigrid or direct solvers for sub-blocks or exact factorization on the separate fields. The numerical results confirm the divergence-free constraint is strongly satisfied and demonstrate the performance of the fieldsplit preconditioner and overall algorithm. The simulation of ITER VDE cases over the actual plasma current diffusion time is also presented.Comment: 43 page