High-order Conservative, Eulerian, Multi-dimensional Hydrodynamic Simulations of Interpenetrating Plasmas

A three-dimensional multi-species, multi-flow set of hydrodynamic equations has been developed. Plasmas moving at high relative velocity evolve on a shared Cartesian mesh nearly independently, coupled weakly by the shared electron pressure, ion-ion drag, electron-ion friction, and temperature equilibration. The electron inertia is neglected in the electron momentum evolution which eliminates the electrostatic potential and the need to solve Poisson's equation. This well-justified approximation for nonrelativistic flows increases the ease of parallelization and eliminates the electron plasma frequency time scale which allows a much larger time step. An arbitrary number of ion species with their own flows and ion temperatures are allowed and simulated in the examples discussed in this talk.
Application to basic physics experiments on collisionless shocks and to indirect-drive laser fusion experiments in hohlraums will be demonstrated.