Smoothed particle hydrodynamics with radiative transfer in the flux-limited diffusion approximation

Abstract

We describe the implementation and testing of a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code that solves the equations of radiation hydrodynamics in the flux-limited diffusion (FLD) approximation. The SPH equations of radiation hydrodynamics for an explicit integration scheme are derived and tested. We also discuss the implementation of an implicit numerical scheme for solving the radiation equations that allows the system to be evolved using time-steps much longer than the explicit radiation time-step. The code is tested on a variety of one-dimensional radiation hydrodynamics problems including radiation propagating in an optically thin medium, optically thick and thin shocks, subcritical and supercritical radiating shocks, and a radiation dominated shock. Many of the tests were also performed by Turner & Stone to test their implementation of a FLD module for the ZEUS-2D code. The SPH code performs at least as well as the ZEUS-2D code in these tests.