A Proper Discretization of Hydrodynamical Equations in the Cylindrical Coordinates for Astrophysical Simulations
Tomoyuki Hanawa (Chiba University)
The cylindrical coordinates are often used in computational fluid dynamics, in particular, when one considers gas flow accreting onto a central object. Although the cylindrical coordinates have several advantages in describing rotation, they have apparent singularity along the axis at the coordinate origin, i.e., the z-axis. This singularity introduce difficulties in numerical simulations. First, it is difficult to reproduce the flow across the z-axis. Second, the time step is extremely shortened by the CFL condition near the z-axis since the numerical cell thereof is narrow in the azimuthal direction for a given angular resolution. Here, we propose a new discretization scheme to overcome these difficulties. In our new scheme, we take account of change in the direction of the unit vector within a cell when evaluating the flux across each cell surface. In addition, we evaluate the source term in the radial component of the momentum equation from the thermal and dynamical pressures working on the azimuthal cell surface. The new scheme is designed to be free stream preserving so that a flow with uniform density, pressure and velocity is an exact solution of the discretized equation. These improvements are essential to use a lower angular resolution innermost area, and thus to elongate each time step. Our examples demonstrate that the innermost circular region around the axis can be resolved by only six numerical cells. The angular resolution is higher at a larger radial distance so that each numerical cell has an aspect ratio close. Then the CFL condition is relaxed. We present an application to an accreting compact star surrounded by a disk in addition to Sod shock tube and rotating outflow tests. These test problems indicate that accuracy and stability are greatly improved.