Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “Mesh Adaptivity”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 739 records · Page 41
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2014

Modeling active galactic nucleus feedback in cool-core clusters: The formation of cold clumps

We perform high-resolution (15-30 pc) adaptive mesh simulations to study the impact of momentum-driven active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback in cool-core clusters, focusing in this paper on the formation of cold clumps. The feedback is jet-driven with an energy determined by the amount of cold gas within 500 pc of the super-massive black hole. When the intracluster medium in the core of the cluster becomes marginally stable to radiative cooling, with the thermal instability to the free-fall timescale ratio t{sub TI}/t{sub ff} < 3-10, cold clumps of gas start to form along the propagation direction of the AGN jets. By tracing the particles in the simulations, we find that these cold clumps originate from low entropy (but still hot) gas that is accelerated by the jet to outward radial velocities of a few hundred km s{sup –1}. This gas is out of hydrostatic equilibrium and so can cool. The clumps then grow larger as they decelerate and fall toward the center of the cluster, eventually being accreted onto the super-massive black hole. The general morphology, spatial distribution, and estimated Hα morphology of the clumps are in reasonable agreement with observations, although we do not fully replicate the filamentary morphology of the clumps seen in the observations, probably due to missing physics.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2014

On the role of ambient environments in the collapse of Bonnor-Ebert spheres

We consider the interaction between a marginally stable Bonnor-Ebert (BE) sphere and the surrounding ambient medium. In particular, we explore how the infall from an evolving ambient medium can trigger the collapse of the sphere using three-dimensional adaptive mesh refinement simulations. We find the resulting collapse dynamics to vary considerably with ambient density. In the highest ambient density cases, infalling material drives a strong compression wave into the cloud. It is the propagation of this wave through the cloud interior that triggers the subsequent collapse. For lower ambient densities, we find the main trigger of collapse to be a quasistatic adjustment of the BE sphere to gravitational settling of the ambient gas. In all cases, we find that the classic 'outside-in' collapse mode for super-critical BE spheres is recovered before a protostar (i.e., sink particle) forms. Our work supports scenarios in which BE dynamics naturally begins with either a compression wave or infall dominated phase, and only later assumes the usual outside-in collapse behavior.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Collapse and fragmentation of magnetic molecular cloud cores with the Enzo AMR MHD code. II. Prolate and oblate cores

We present the results of a large suite of three-dimensional models of the collapse of magnetic molecular cloud cores using the adaptive mesh refinement code Enzo2.2 in the ideal magnetohydrodynamics approximation. The cloud cores are initially either prolate or oblate, centrally condensed clouds with masses of 1.73 or 2.73 M {sub ☉}, respectively. The radial density profiles are Gaussian, with central densities 20 times higher than boundary densities. A barotropic equation of state is used to represent the transition from low density isothermal phases, to high density optically thick phases. The initial magnetic field strength ranges from 6.3 to 100 μG, corresponding to clouds that are strongly to marginally supercritical, respectively, in terms of the mass to magnetic flux ratio. The magnetic field is initially uniform and aligned with the clouds' rotation axes, with initial ratios of rotational to gravitational energy ranging from 10{sup –4} to 0.1. Two significantly different outcomes for collapse result: (1) formation of single protostars with spiral arms, and (2) fragmentation into multiple protostar systems. The transition between these two outcomes depends primarily on the initial magnetic field strength, with fragmentation occurring for mass to flux ratios greater than about 14 times the critical ratio for prolate clouds. Oblate clouds typically fragment into several times more clumps than prolate clouds. Multiple, rather than binary, system formation is the general rule in either case, suggesting that binary stars are primarily the result of the orbital dissolution of multiple protostar systems.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2014

dynamical evolution of an ultra-relativistic fireball colliding with a freely expanding gas

We investigate the hydrodynamical evolution of an ultra-relativistic fireball colliding with a freely expanding gas. The hydrodynamical interaction of the fireball and the gas results in the formation of a geometrically thin shell. We study the dynamical evolution of the shell analytically and perform a numerical simulation equipped with adaptive mesh refinement to investigate the internal structure of the shell. The shocked gas can give rise to bright emission in the X-ray and gamma-ray energy range. We propose that the breakout emission from the forward shock and the photospheric emission from the reverse-shocked fireball contribute to early gamma-ray emission from gamma-ray bursts.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Infall-driven protostellar accretion and the solution to the luminosity problem

We investigate the role of mass infall in the formation and evolution of protostars. To avoid ad hoc initial and boundary conditions, we consider the infall resulting self-consistently from modeling the formation of stellar clusters in turbulent molecular clouds. We show that infall rates in turbulent clouds are comparable to accretion rates inferred from protostellar luminosities or measured in pre-main-sequence stars. They should not be neglected in modeling the luminosity of protostars and the evolution of disks, even after the embedded protostellar phase. We find large variations of infall rates from protostar to protostar, and large fluctuations during the evolution of individual protostars. In most cases, the infall rate is initially of order 10{sup –5} M {sub ☉} yr{sup –1}, and may either decay rapidly in the formation of low-mass stars, or remain relatively large when more massive stars are formed. The simulation reproduces well the observed characteristic values and scatter of protostellar luminosities and matches the observed protostellar luminosity function. The luminosity problem is therefore solved once realistic protostellar infall histories are accounted for, with no need for extreme accretion episodes. These results are based on a simulation of randomly driven magnetohydrodynamic turbulence on a scale of 4 pc, including self-gravity, adaptive-mesh refinement to a resolution of 50 AU, and accreting sink particles. The simulation yields a low star formation rate, consistent with the observations, and a mass distribution of sink particles consistent with the observed stellar initial mass function during the whole duration of the simulation, forming nearly 1300 sink particles over 3.2 Myr.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Colliding filaments and a massive dense core in the Cygnus OB 7 molecular cloud

We report the results of molecular line observations carried out toward a massive dense core in the Cyg OB 7 molecular cloud. The core has an extraordinarily large mass (∼1.1 × 10{sup 4} M {sub ☉}) and size (∼2 × 5 pc{sup 2}), but there is no massive young star forming therein. We observed this core in various molecular lines such as C{sup 18}O(J = 1-0) using the 45 m telescope at Nobeyama Radio Observatory. We find that the core has an elongated morphology consisting of several filaments and core-like structures. The filaments are massive (10{sup 2}-10{sup 3} M {sub ☉}), and they are apparently colliding with one another. Some candidates for young stellar objects are distributed around their intersection, suggesting that the collisions of the filaments may have influenced their formation. To understand the formation and evolution of such colliding filaments, we performed numerical simulations using the adaptive mesh refinement technique, adopting the observed core parameters (the mass and size) as the initial conditions. The results indicate that the filaments are formed as seen in other earlier simulations for small cores in the literature, but we could not reproduce the collisions of the filaments simply by assuming a large initial mass and size. We find that collisions of the filaments occur only when there is a large velocity gradient in the initial core, in a sense compressing it. We suggest that the observed core was actually compressed by an external effect, e.g., shocks from nearby supernova remnants, including HB 21 which has been suggested to be interacting with the Cyg OB 7 molecular cloud.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2015

THE LAUNCHING OF COLD CLOUDS BY GALAXY OUTFLOWS. I. HYDRODYNAMIC INTERACTIONS WITH RADIATIVE COOLING

To better understand the nature of the multiphase material found in outflowing galaxies, we study the evolution of cold clouds embedded in flows of hot and fast material. Using a suite of adaptive mesh refinement simulations that include radiative cooling, we investigate both cloud mass loss and cloud acceleration under the full range of conditions observed in galaxy outflows. The simulations are designed to track the cloud center of mass, enabling us to study the cloud evolution at long disruption times. For supersonic flows, a Mach cone forms around the cloud, which damps the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability but also establishes a streamwise pressure gradient that stretches the cloud apart. If time is expressed in units of the cloud crushing time, both the cloud lifetime and the cloud acceleration rate are independent of cloud radius, and we find simple scalings for these quantities as a function of the Mach number of the external medium. A resolution study suggests that our simulations accurately describe the evolution of cold clouds in the absence of thermal conduction and magnetic fields, physical processes whose roles will be studied in forthcoming papers.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Cooling, AGN feedback, and star formation in simulated cool-core galaxy clusters

Numerical simulations of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) feedback in cool-core galaxy clusters have successfully avoided classical cooling flows, but often produce too much cold gas. We perform adaptive mesh simulations that include momentum-driven AGN feedback, self-gravity, star formation, and stellar feedback, focusing on the interplay between cooling, AGN heating, and star formation in an isolated cool-core cluster. Cold clumps triggered by AGN jets and turbulence form filamentary structures tens of kpc long. This cold gas feeds both star formation and the supermassive black hole (SMBH), triggering an AGN outburst that increases the entropy of the intracluster medium (ICM) and reduces its cooling rate. Within 1–2 Gyr, star formation completely consumes the cold gas, leading to a brief shutoff of the AGN. The ICM quickly cools and redevelops multiphase gas, followed by another cycle of star formation/AGN outburst. Within 6.5 Gyr, we observe three such cycles. There is good agreement between our simulated cluster and the observations of cool-core clusters. ICM cooling is dynamically balanced by AGN heating, and a cool-core appearance is preserved. The minimum cooling time to free-fall time ratio typically varies between a few and ≳20. The star formation rate (SFR) covers a wide range, from 0 to a few hundred M{sub ⊙} yr{sup −1}, with an average of ∼40 M{sub ⊙} yr{sup −1}. The instantaneous SMBH accretion rate shows large variations on short timescales, but the average value correlates well with the SFR. Simulations without stellar feedback or self-gravity produce qualitatively similar results, but a lower SMBH feedback efficiency (0.1% compared to 1%) results in too many stars.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2015

MULTI-PARAMETRIC STUDY OF RISING 3D BUOYANT FLUX TUBES IN AN ADIABATIC STRATIFICATION USING AMR

We study the buoyant rise of magnetic flux tubes embedded in an adiabatic stratification using two-and three-dimensional, magnetohydrodynamic simulations. We analyze the dependence of the tube evolution on the field line twist and on the curvature of the tube axis in different diffusion regimes. To be able to achieve a comparatively high spatial resolution we use the FLASH code, which has a built-in Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) capability. Our 3D experiments reach Reynolds numbers that permit a reasonable comparison of the results with those of previous 2D simulations. When the experiments are run without AMR, hence with a comparatively large diffusivity, the amount of longitudinal magnetic flux retained inside the tube increases with the curvature of the tube axis. However, when a low-diffusion regime is reached by using the AMR algorithms, the magnetic twist is able to prevent the splitting of the magnetic loop into vortex tubes and the loop curvature does not play any significant role. We detect the generation of vorticity in the main body of the tube of opposite sign on the opposite sides of the apex. This is a consequence of the inhomogeneity of the azimuthal component of the field on the flux surfaces. The lift force associated with this global vorticity makes the flanks of the tube move away from their initial vertical plane in an antisymmetric fashion. The trajectories have an oscillatory motion superimposed, due to the shedding of vortex rolls to the wake, which creates a Von Karman street.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Mass transport and turbulence in gravitationally unstable disk galaxies. I. The case of pure self-gravity

The role of gravitational instability-driven turbulence in determining the structure and evolution of disk galaxies, and the extent to which gravity rather than feedback can explain galaxy properties, remains an open question. To address it, we present high-resolution adaptive mesh refinement simulations of Milky Way-like isolated disk galaxies, including realistic heating and cooling rates and a physically motivated prescription for star formation, but no form of star formation feedback. After an initial transient, our galaxies reach a state of fully nonlinear gravitational instability. In this state, gravity drives turbulence and radial inflow. Despite the lack of feedback, the gas in our galaxy models shows substantial turbulent velocity dispersions, indicating that gravitational instability alone may be able to power the velocity dispersions observed in nearby disk galaxies on 100 pc scales. Moreover, the rate of mass transport produced by this turbulence approaches ∼1 M{sub ⊙} yr{sup −1} for Milky Way-like conditions, sufficient to fully fuel star formation in the inner disks of galaxies. In a companion paper, we add feedback to our models, and use the comparison between the two cases to understand which galaxy properties depend sensitively on feedback and which can be understood as the product of gravity alone. All of the code, initial conditions, and simulation data for our model are publicly available.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2010

PARALLEL HOP: A SCALABLE HALO FINDER FOR MASSIVE COSMOLOGICAL DATA SETS

Modern N-body cosmological simulations contain billions (10{sup 9}) of dark matter particles. These simulations require hundreds to thousands of gigabytes of memory and employ hundreds to tens of thousands of processing cores on many compute nodes. In order to study the distribution of dark matter in a cosmological simulation, the dark matter halos must be identified using a halo finder, which establishes the halo membership of every particle in the simulation. The resources required for halo finding are similar to the requirements for the simulation itself. In particular, simulations have become too extensive to use commonly employed halo finders, such that the computational requirements to identify halos must now be spread across multiple nodes and cores. Here, we present a scalable-parallel halo finding method called Parallel HOP for large-scale cosmological simulation data. Based on the halo finder HOP, it utilizes message passing interface and domain decomposition to distribute the halo finding workload across multiple compute nodes, enabling analysis of much larger data sets than is possible with the strictly serial or previous parallel implementations of HOP. We provide a reference implementation of this method as a part of the toolkit {sup yt}, an analysis toolkit for adaptive mesh refinement data that include complementary analysis modules. Additionally, we discuss a suite of benchmarks that demonstrate that this method scales well up to several hundred tasks and data sets in excess of 2000{sup 3} particles. The Parallel HOP method and our implementation can be readily applied to any kind of N-body simulation data and is therefore widely applicable.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2010

THREE-DIMENSIONAL MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMICAL SIMULATIONS OF GRAVITATIONAL COLLAPSE OF A 15 M {sub sun} STAR

We introduce our two different newly developed, three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamical codes in detail. One of them is written in the Newtonian limit (NMHD) and the other is a fully general relativistic code (GRMHD). Both codes employ adaptive mesh refinement and, in GRMHD, the metric is evolved with the 'Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura' formalism known as the most stable method at present. We conducted several test problems and as for the first practical test, we calculated the gravitational collapse of a 15 M {sub sun} star. The main features found from our calculations are: (1) high-velocity bipolar outflow is driven from the proto-neutron star and moves along the rotational axis in strongly magnetized models, (2) a one-armed spiral structure appears, which originates from the low-|T/W| instability, and (3) by comparing the GRMHD and NMHD models, the maximum density increases about {approx}30% in GRMHD models due to the stronger gravitational effect. These features agree very well with previous studies and our codes are thus reliable for numerical simulation of gravitational collapse of massive stars.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2011

MODULES FOR EXPERIMENTS IN STELLAR ASTROPHYSICS (MESA)

Stellar physics and evolution calculations enable a broad range of research in astrophysics. Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) is a suite of open source, robust, efficient, thread-safe libraries for a wide range of applications in computational stellar astrophysics. A one-dimensional stellar evolution module, MESAstar, combines many of the numerical and physics modules for simulations of a wide range of stellar evolution scenarios ranging from very low mass to massive stars, including advanced evolutionary phases. MESAstar solves the fully coupled structure and composition equations simultaneously. It uses adaptive mesh refinement and sophisticated timestep controls, and supports shared memory parallelism based on OpenMP. State-of-the-art modules provide equation of state, opacity, nuclear reaction rates, element diffusion data, and atmosphere boundary conditions. Each module is constructed as a separate Fortran 95 library with its own explicitly defined public interface to facilitate independent development. Several detailed examples indicate the extensive verification and testing that is continuously performed and demonstrate the wide range of capabilities that MESA possesses. These examples include evolutionary tracks of very low mass stars, brown dwarfs, and gas giant planets to very old ages; the complete evolutionary track of a 1 M {sub sun} star from the pre-main sequence (PMS) to a cooling white dwarf; the solar sound speed profile; the evolution of intermediate-mass stars through the He-core burning phase and thermal pulses on the He-shell burning asymptotic giant branch phase; the interior structure of slowly pulsating B Stars and Beta Cepheids; the complete evolutionary tracks of massive stars from the PMS to the onset of core collapse; mass transfer from stars undergoing Roche lobe overflow; and the evolution of helium accretion onto a neutron star. MESA can be downloaded from the project Web site (http://mesa.sourceforge.net/).

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2011

CASTRO: A NEW COMPRESSIBLE ASTROPHYSICAL SOLVER. II. GRAY RADIATION HYDRODYNAMICS

We describe the development of a flux-limited gray radiation solver for the compressible astrophysics code, CASTRO. CASTRO uses an Eulerian grid with block-structured adaptive mesh refinement based on a nested hierarchy of logically rectangular variable-sized grids with simultaneous refinement in both space and time. The gray radiation solver is based on a mixed-frame formulation of radiation hydrodynamics. In our approach, the system is split into two parts, one part that couples the radiation and fluid in a hyperbolic subsystem, and another parabolic part that evolves radiation diffusion and source-sink terms. The hyperbolic subsystem is solved explicitly with a high-order Godunov scheme, whereas the parabolic part is solved implicitly with a first-order backward Euler method.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2012

IMPOSING A LAGRANGIAN PARTICLE FRAMEWORK ON AN EULERIAN HYDRODYNAMICS INFRASTRUCTURE IN FLASH

In many astrophysical simulations, both Eulerian and Lagrangian quantities are of interest. For example, in a galaxy cluster merger simulation, the intracluster gas can have Eulerian discretization, while dark matter can be modeled using particles. FLASH, a component-based scientific simulation code, superimposes a Lagrangian framework atop an adaptive mesh refinement Eulerian framework to enable such simulations. The discretization of the field variables is Eulerian, while the Lagrangian entities occur in many different forms including tracer particles, massive particles, charged particles in particle-in-cell mode, and Lagrangian markers to model fluid-structure interactions. These widely varying roles for Lagrangian entities are possible because of the highly modular, flexible, and extensible architecture of the Lagrangian framework. In this paper, we describe the Lagrangian framework in FLASH in the context of two very different applications, Type Ia supernovae and galaxy cluster mergers, which use the Lagrangian entities in fundamentally different ways.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2013

CASTRO: A NEW COMPRESSIBLE ASTROPHYSICAL SOLVER. III. MULTIGROUP RADIATION HYDRODYNAMICS

We present a formulation for multigroup radiation hydrodynamics that is correct to order O(v/c) using the comoving-frame approach and the flux-limited diffusion approximation. We describe a numerical algorithm for solving the system, implemented in the compressible astrophysics code, CASTRO. CASTRO uses a Eulerian grid with block-structured adaptive mesh refinement based on a nested hierarchy of logically rectangular variable-sized grids with simultaneous refinement in both space and time. In our multigroup radiation solver, the system is split into three parts: one part that couples the radiation and fluid in a hyperbolic subsystem, another part that advects the radiation in frequency space, and a parabolic part that evolves radiation diffusion and source-sink terms. The hyperbolic subsystem and the frequency space advection are solved explicitly with high-order Godunov schemes, whereas the parabolic part is solved implicitly with a first-order backward Euler method. Our multigroup radiation solver works for both neutrino and photon radiation.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Dislocation dynamics in polycrystalline materials

An extension of the dislocation dynamics method to polycrystalline materials is presented with emphasis on handling interactions between dislocations and grain boundaries. The key new features of the method include: (1) a grain boundary detection algorithm, (2) new dislocation emission criteria based on power dissipation and area growth, (3) mobility of dislocations at grain boundaries, and (4) extension of topological operations e.g. mesh adaption, collision, and dissociation to handle dislocations interacting with grain boundaries. Furthermore, verification and validation examples are executed to compare our calculations with existing analytic methods, molecular dynamics simulations, and experimental observations.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2014

Simulating the universe(s): from cosmic bubble collisions to cosmological observables with numerical relativity

The theory of eternal inflation in an inflaton potential with multiple vacua predicts that our universe is one of many bubble universes nucleating and growing inside an ever-expanding false vacuum. The collision of our bubble with another could provide an important observational signature to test this scenario. We develop and implement an algorithm for accurately computing the cosmological observables arising from bubble collisions directly from the Lagrangian of a single scalar field. We first simulate the collision spacetime by solving Einstein's equations, starting from nucleation and ending at reheating. Taking advantage of the collision's hyperbolic symmetry, the simulations are performed with a 1+1-dimensional fully relativistic code that uses adaptive mesh refinement. We then calculate the comoving curvature perturbation in an open Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe, which is used to determine the temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background radiation. For a fiducial Lagrangian, the anisotropies are well described by a power law in the cosine of the angular distance from the center of the collision signature. For a given form of the Lagrangian, the resulting observational predictions are inherently statistical due to stochastic elements of the bubble nucleation process. Further uncertainties arise due to our imperfect knowledge about inflationary and pre-recombination physics. We characterize observational predictions by computing the probability distributions over four phenomenological parameters which capture these intrinsic and model uncertainties. This represents the first fully-relativistic set of predictions from an ensemble of scalar field models giving rise to eternal inflation, yielding significant differences from previous non-relativistic approximations. Thus, our results provide a basis for a rigorous confrontation of these theories with cosmological data.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗