Magnetohydrodynamics Adaptive Solvers in the AMROC Framework for Space Plasma Applications

Abstract

Plasma disturbances affect satellites, spacecraft and can cause serious problems to telecommunications and sensitive sensor-systems on Earth. Considering the huge scale of the plasma phenomena, data collection at individual locations is not sufficient to cover this entire relevant environment. Therefore, computational plasma modelling has become a significant issue for space sciences, particularly for the near-Earth magnetosphere. However, the simulations of these disturbances present many physical as well as numerical and computational challenges. In this work, we discuss our recent magnetohydrodynamic solver, realised within the MPI-parallel AMROC (Adaptive Mesh Refinement in Object-oriented C ++ ) framework, in which particular physical models and automatic mesh generation procedures have been implemented. A performance analysis using a selection of significant space applications validates the solvers capabilities and confirms the technical importance of our approach.