A staggered Lagrangian magnetohydrodynamics method based on subcell Riemann solver

Abstract

This paper uses a general formalism to derive staggered Lagrangian method for 2D compressible magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) flows. A subcell method is introduced to discretize the MHD system and some Riemann problems over subcells are solved at the cell center and grid node respectively. In these solvers, only the fast-waves in all jumping relations are considered and thus the solution structure is simple. The discrete conservations of mass, momentum and energy are preserved naturally in the proposed numerical method. In order to meet the thermodynamic Gibbs relation in isentropic flows, an adaptive Riemann solver is implemented at the cell center, in which a criterion is proposed to reduce overheating errors in the rarefying problems and maintains the excellent shock-capturing ability simultaneously. It is worth to be noticed that the divergence-free condition is naturally satisfied in the Lagrangian method. Various numerical tests are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the algorithm.