Investigating the Two-fluid plasma Richtmyer-Meshkov Instability: A Tale of Two Codes

Abstract

The application of numerical methods to the solution of two-fluid plasma flows requires the intentional application of methods to enforce the divergence conditions present in Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism. Two methods are investigated in this work, the perfectly hyperbolic Maxwell's (PHM) equations and the constrained transport (CT) method. It is shown that with the current implementation the CT method is highly effective in maintaining divergence conservation while the PHM method provides a moderate improvement over simulations with no application of divergence constraints. However, it is also shown that the CT method is sensitive to plasma conditions such that simulations involving small length scale plasmas lead to non-physical results. The results generated by the CT and PHM methods, where the CT method is viable, are also shown to demonstrate minimal variation in the primitive variables.