Plasma kinetics: Discrete Boltzmann modeling and Richtmyer–Meshkov instability

Abstract

In this paper, a discrete Boltzmann method (DBM) for plasma kinetics is proposed and further used to investigate the non-equilibrium characteristics in Orszag–Tang (OT) vortex and Richtmyer–Meshkov instability (RMI) problems. The construction of DBM mainly considers two aspects. The first is to build a physical model with sufficient capability to capture underlying physics. The second is to devise schemes for extracting more valuable information from massive data. For the first aspect, the generated model is equivalent to a magnetohydrodynamic model, and a coarse-grained model for extracting the most relevant thermodynamic non-equilibrium (TNE) behaviors including the entropy production rate. For the second aspect, the DBM uses non-conserved kinetic moments of (f−feq) to describe the non-equilibrium states and behaviors of complex systems. It is found that (i) for OT vortex, the entropy production rate and compression difficulty first increase and then decrease with time. (ii) For RMI with interface inversion and re-shock process, the influence of magnetic field on TNE effects shows stages: before the interface inversion, the TNE strength is enhanced by delaying the interface inversion; while after the interface inversion, the TNE strength is significantly reduced. Both the global average TNE strength and entropy production rate contributed by non-organized energy flux can be used as physical criteria to identify whether or not the magnetic field is sufficient to prevent the interface inversion. In general, this paper proposes a generalized physical modeling and analysis scheme that has the potential for investigating the kinetic physics in plasma.