Radiation hydrodynamics including irradiation and adaptive mesh refinement with AZEuS. I. Methods

Abstract

Aims. The importance of radiation to the physical structure of protoplanetary disks cannot be understated. However, protoplanetary disks evolve with time, and so to understand disk evolution and by association, disk structure, one should solve the combined and time-dependent equations of radiation hydrodynamics. Methods. We implement a new implicit radiation solver in the AZEuS adaptive mesh refinement magnetohydrodynamics fluid code. Based on a hybrid approach that combines frequency-dependent ray-tracing for stellar irradiation with non-equilibrium flux limited diffusion, we solve the equations of radiation hydrodynamics while preserving the directionality of the stellar irradiation. The implementation permits simulations in Cartesian, cylindrical, and spherical coordinates, on both uniform and adaptive grids. Results. We present several hydrostatic and hydrodynamic radiation tests which validate our implementation on uniform and adaptive grids as appropriate, including benchmarks specifically designed for protoplanetary disks. Our results demonstrate that the combination of a hybrid radiation algorithm with AZEuS is an effective tool for radiation hydrodynamics studies, and produces results which are competitive with other astrophysical radiation hydrodynamics codes.

15 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in A&A

References in corpus (3)

• Equations and Algorithms for Mixed Frame Flux-Limited Diffusion Radiation Hydrodynamics
• 3D Radiative Hydrodynamics for Disk Stability Simulations: A Proposed Testing Standard and New Results
• A general hybrid radiation transport scheme for star formation simulations on an adaptive grid

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Global Hydromagnetic Simulations of Protoplanetary Disks with Stellar Irradiation and Simplified Thermochemistry
• Grand challenges in protoplanetary disc modelling
• Collapse of turbulent massive cores with ambipolar diffusion and hybrid radiative transfer I. Accretion and multiplicity
• Makemake + Sedna: A Continuum Radiation Transport and Photoionization Framework for Astrophysical Newtonian Fluid Dynamics
• VETTAM: A scheme for radiation hydrodynamics with adaptive mesh refinement using the variable Eddington tensor method