TRHD: Three-temperature radiation-hydrodynamics code with an implicit non-equilibrium radiation transport using a cell-centered monotonic finite volume scheme on unstructured-grids

Abstract

Three-temperature (3T), unstructured-mesh, non-equilibrium radiation hydrodynamics (RHD) code have been developed for the simulation of intense thermal radiation or high-power laser driven radiative shock hydrodynamics in two-dimensional (2D) axis-symmetric geometries. The governing hydrodynamics equations are solved using a compatible unstructured Lagrangian method based on a control volume differencing (CVD) scheme. A second-order predictor–corrector (PC) integration scheme is used for the temporal discretization of the hydrodynamics equations. For the radiation energy transport, frequency averaged gray model is used in which the flux-limited diffusion (FLD) approximation is used to recover the free-streaming limit of the radiation propagation in optically thin regions. The proposed RHD model allows to have different temperatures for the electrons and ions. In addition to this, the electron and thermal radiation temperatures are assumed to be in non-equilibrium. Therefore, the thermal relaxation between the electrons and ions and the coupling between the radiation and matter energies are required to be computed self-consistently. For this, the coupled flux limited electron heat conduction and the non-equilibrium radiation diffusion equations are solved simultaneously by using an implicit, axis-symmetric, cell-centered, monotonic, nonlinear finite volume (NLFV) scheme. In this paper, we have described the details of the 2D, 3T, non-equilibrium RHD code developed along with a suite of validation test problems to demonstrate the accuracy and performance of the algorithms. We have also conducted a performance analysis with different linearity preserving interpolation schemes that are used for the evaluation of the nodal values in the NLFV scheme. Finally, in order to demonstrate full capability of the code implementation, we have presented the simulation of laser driven thin Aluminum (Al) foil acceleration. The simulation results are found to be in good agreement with the known solutions of RHD problems.