A Comparative Study of Divergence Cleaning Methods of Magnetic Field in the Solar Coronal Numerical Simulation

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative study of divergence cleaning methods of magnetic field in the solar coronal three-dimensional numerical simulation. For such purpose, the diffusive method, projection method, generalized Lagrange multiplier method and constrained-transport method are used. All these methods are combined with a finite-volume scheme in spherical coordinates. In order to see the performance between the four divergence cleaning methods, solar coronal numerical simulation for Carrington rotation 2056 has been studied. Numerical results show that the average relative divergence error is around 10−4.5 for the constrained-transport method, while about 10−3.1−10−3.6 for the other three methods. Although there exist some differences in the average relative divergence errors for the four employed methods, our tests show they can all produce basic structured solar wind.