Efficient, high accuracy ADER-WENO schemes for hydrodynamics and divergence-free magnetohydrodynamics

The present paper introduces a class of finite volume schemes of increasing order of accuracy in space and time for hyperbolic systems that are in conservation form. The methods are specially suited for efficient implementation on structured meshes. The hyperbolic system is required to be non-stiff. This paper specifically focuses on Euler system that is used for modeling the flow of neutral fluids and the divergence-free, ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) system that is used for large scale modeling of ionized plasmas. Efficient techniques for weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) interpolation have been developed for finite volume reconstruction on structured meshes. We have shown that the most elegant and compact formulation of WENO reconstruction obtains when the interpolating functions are expressed in modal space. Explicit formulae have been provided for schemes having up to fourth order of spatial accuracy. Divergence-free evolution of magnetic fields requires the magnetic field components and their moments to be defined in the zone faces. We draw on a reconstruction strategy developed recently by the first author to show that a high order specification of the magnetic field components in zone-faces naturally furnishes an appropriately high order representation of the magnetic field within the zone. We also present a new formulation of the ADER (for Arbitrary Derivative Riemann Problem) schemes that relies on a local continuous space-time Galerkin formulation instead of the usual Cauchy-Kovalewski procedure. We call such schemes ADER-CG and show that a very elegant and compact formulation results when the scheme is formulated in modal space. Explicit formulae have been provided on structured meshes for ADER-CG schemes in three dimensions for all orders of accuracy that extend up to fourth order. Such ADER schemes have been used to temporally evolve the WENO-based spatial reconstruction. The resulting ADER-WENO schemes provide temporal accuracy that matches the spatial accuracy of the underlying WENO reconstruction. In this paper we have also provided a point-wise description of ADER-WENO schemes for divergence-free MHD in a fashion that facilitates computer implementation. The schemes reported here have all been implemented in the RIEMANN framework for computational astrophysics. All the methods presented have a one-step update, making them low-storage alternatives to the usual Runge-Kutta time-discretization. Their one-step update also makes them suitable building blocks for adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) calculations. We demonstrate that the ADER-WENO meet their design accuracies. Several stringent test problems of Euler flows and MHD flows are presented in one, two and three dimensions. Many of our test problems involve near infinite shocks in multiple dimensions and the higher order schemes are shown to perform very robustly and accurately under all conditions. It is shown that the increasing computational complexity with increasing order is handily offset by the increased accuracy of the scheme. The resulting ADER-WENO schemes are, therefore, very worthy alternatives to the standard second order schemes for compressible Euler and MHD flow. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.