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Paper: Numerical Modeling of Weakly Ionized Plasmas
Volume: 385, Numerical Modeling of Space Plasma Flows: Astronum-2007
Page: 174
Authors: O'Sullivan, S.; Downes, T.P.
Abstract: Multifluid magnetohydrodynamics is not a well explored field of numerical astrophysics. The reasons for this have been largely pragmatic due to the inherent difficulties of applying conventional numerical methods; explicit techniques range in efficiency from low to none, and implicit techniques are notoriously problematic for codes which rely on distributed architectures and adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) as is de rigeur for modern large scale simulations.

In this paper, a novel explicit technique is presented which does not suffer the same strong efficiency constraints as conventional explicit methods. The symmetric and skew-symmetric components of the multifluid diffusion operator are multiplicatively operator split and integrated via an accelerated substepping scheme, and an unconditionally stable explicit method respectively. Crucially, unlike implicit methods, the technique is also easily implemented in existing AMR driven and parallelised code frameworks.

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