A positive conservative method for magnetohydrodynamics based on HLL and Roe methods

P. Janhunen

J. Comp. Phys., accepted

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Abstract. The exact Riemann problem solutions of the usual equations of ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) can have negative pressures, if the initial data has $\nabla\cdot{\bf B}\ne 0$. This creates a problem for numerical solving because in a first order finite-volume conservative Godunov-type method one cannot avoid jumps in the normal magnetic field component even if the magnetic field was divergenceless in the three-dimensional sense. We show that by allowing magnetic monopoles in MHD equations and properly taking into account the magnetostatic contribution to the Lorentz force, an additional source term appears in Faraday's law only. Using the Harten-Lax-vanLeer-Einfeldt (HLL) Riemann solver and discretizing the source term in a specific manner, we obtain a method which is positive and conservative. We show positivity by extensive numerical experimentation. This MHD-HLL method is positive and conservative but rather diffusive, thus we show how to hybridize this method with the Roe method to obtain a much higher accuracy while still retaining positivity. The result is a fully robust positive conservative scheme for ideal MHD, whose accuracy and efficiency properties are similar to the first order Roe method and which keeps $\nabla\cdot{\bf B}$ small in the same sense as Powell's method. As a special case, a method with similar characteristics for accuracy and robustness is obtained for the Euler equations as well.

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