145 research outputs found
The Convergence of Particle-in-Cell Schemes for Cosmological Dark Matter Simulations
Particle methods are a ubiquitous tool for solving the Vlasov-Poisson
equation in comoving coordinates, which is used to model the gravitational
evolution of dark matter in an expanding universe. However, these methods are
known to produce poor results on idealized test problems, particularly at late
times, after the particle trajectories have crossed. To investigate this, we
have performed a series of one- and two-dimensional "Zel'dovich Pancake"
calculations using the popular Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method. We find that PIC
can indeed converge on these problems provided the following modifications are
made. The first modification is to regularize the singular initial distribution
function by introducing a small but finite artificial velocity dispersion. This
process is analogous to artificial viscosity in compressible gas dynamics, and,
as with artificial viscosity, the amount of regularization can be tailored so
that its effect outside of a well-defined region - in this case, the
high-density caustics - is small. The second modification is the introduction
of a particle remapping procedure that periodically re-expresses the dark
matter distribution function using a new set of particles. We describe a
remapping algorithm that is third-order accurate and adaptive in phase space.
This procedure prevents the accumulation of numerical errors in integrating the
particle trajectories from growing large enough to significantly degrade the
solution. Once both of these changes are made, PIC converges at second order on
the Zel'dovich Pancake problem, even at late times, after many caustics have
formed. Furthermore, the resulting scheme does not suffer from the unphysical,
small-scale "clumping" phenomenon known to occur on the Pancake problem when
the perturbation wave vector is not aligned with one of the Cartesian
coordinate axes.Comment: 29 pages, 29 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ. The revised
version includes a discussion of energy conservation in the remapping
procedure, as well as some interpretive differences in the Conclusions made
in response to the referee report. Results themselves are unchange
A 4th-Order Particle-in-Cell Method with Phase-Space Remapping for the Vlasov-Poisson Equation
Numerical solutions to the Vlasov-Poisson system of equations have important
applications to both plasma physics and cosmology. In this paper, we present a
new Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method for solving this system that is 4th-order
accurate in both space and time. Our method is a high-order extension of one
presented previously [B. Wang, G. Miller, and P. Colella, SIAM J. Sci. Comput.,
33 (2011), pp. 3509--3537]. It treats all of the stages of the standard PIC
update - charge deposition, force interpolation, the field solve, and the
particle push - with 4th-order accuracy, and includes a 6th-order accurate
phase-space remapping step for controlling particle noise. We demonstrate the
convergence of our method on a series of one- and two- dimensional
electrostatic plasma test problems, comparing its accuracy to that of a
2nd-order method. As expected, the 4th-order method can achieve comparable
accuracy to the 2nd-order method with many fewer resolution elements.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, submitted to SIS
Computations of Unsteady Viscous Compressible Flows Using Adaptive Mesh Refinement in Curvilinear Body-fitted Grid Systems
A methodology for accurate and efficient simulation of unsteady, compressible flows is presented. The cornerstones of the methodology are a special discretization of the Navier-Stokes equations on structured body-fitted grid systems and an efficient solution-adaptive mesh refinement technique for structured grids. The discretization employs an explicit multidimensional upwind scheme for the inviscid fluxes and an implicit treatment of the viscous terms. The mesh refinement technique is based on the AMR algorithm of Berger and Colella. In this approach, cells on each level of refinement are organized into a small number of topologically rectangular blocks, each containing several thousand cells. The small number of blocks leads to small overhead in managing data, while their size and regular topology means that a high degree of optimization can be achieved on computers with vector processors
Adaptive Mesh Refinement in Curvilinear Body-Fitted Grid Systems
To be truly compatible with structured grids, an AMR algorithm should employ a block structure for the refined grids to allow flow solvers to take advantage of the strengths of unstructured grid systems, such as efficient solution algorithms for implicit discretizations and multigrid schemes. One such algorithm, the AMR algorithm of Berger and Colella, has been applied to and adapted for use with body-fitted structured grid systems. Results are presented for a transonic flow over a NACA0012 airfoil (AGARD-03 test case) and a reflection of a shock over a double wedge
High-order Discretization of a Gyrokinetic Vlasov Model in Edge Plasma Geometry
We present a high-order spatial discretization of a continuum gyrokinetic
Vlasov model in axisymmetric tokamak edge plasma geometries. Such models
describe the phase space advection of plasma species distribution functions in
the absence of collisions. The gyrokinetic model is posed in a four-dimensional
phase space, upon which a grid is imposed when discretized. To mitigate the
computational cost associated with high-dimensional grids, we employ a
high-order discretization to reduce the grid size needed to achieve a given
level of accuracy relative to lower-order methods. Strong anisotropy induced by
the magnetic field motivates the use of mapped coordinate grids aligned with
magnetic flux surfaces. The natural partitioning of the edge geometry by the
separatrix between the closed and open field line regions leads to the
consideration of multiple mapped blocks, in what is known as a mapped
multiblock (MMB) approach. We describe the specialization of a more general
formalism that we have developed for the construction of high-order,
finite-volume discretizations on MMB grids, yielding the accurate evaluation of
the gyrokinetic Vlasov operator, the metric factors resulting from the MMB
coordinate mappings, and the interaction of blocks at adjacent boundaries. Our
conservative formulation of the gyrokinetic Vlasov model incorporates the fact
that the phase space velocity has zero divergence, which must be preserved
discretely to avoid truncation error accumulation. We describe an approach for
the discrete evaluation of the gyrokinetic phase space velocity that preserves
the divergence-free property to machine precision
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