A novel high-order, entropy stable, 3D AMR MHD solver with guaranteed positive pressure

Abstract

We describe a high-order numerical magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) solver built upon a novel non-linear entropy stable numerical flux function that supports eight travelling wave solutions. By construction the solver conserves mass, momentum, and energy and is entropy stable. The method is designed to treat the divergence-free constraint on the magnetic field in a similar fashion to a hyperbolic divergence cleaning technique. The solver described herein is especially well-suited for flows involving strong discontinuities. Furthermore, we present a new formulation to guarantee positivity of the pressure. We present the underlying theory and implementation of the new solver into the multi-physics, multi-scale adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) simulation code FLASH (http://flash.uchicago.edu). The accuracy, robustness and computational efficiency is demonstrated with a number of tests, including comparisons to available MHD implementations in FLASH.