High order conservative finite difference WENO scheme for three-temperature radiation hydrodynamics

The three-temperature (3-T) radiation hydrodynamics (RH) equations play an important role in the high-energy-density-physics fields, such as astrophysics and inertial confinement fusion (ICF). It describes the interaction between radiation and high-energy-density plasmas including electron and ion in the assumption that radiation, electron and ion are in their own equilibrium state, which means they can be characterized by their own temperatures. The 3-T RH system consists of the density, momentum and three internal energy (electron, ion and radiation) equations. In this paper, we propose a high order conservative finite difference weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme solving one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) 3-T RH equations respectively. Following our previous paper [7], we introduce the three new energy variables, and then design a finite difference scheme with both the conservative property and arbitrary high order accuracy. Based on the WENO interpolation and the strong stability preserving (SSP) high order time discretizations, taken as an example, we design a class of fifth order conservative finite difference schemes in space and third order in time. Compared with the Lagrangian method we proposed in [7], which can only reach second order accuracy for 2D 3-T RH equations if straightline edged meshes are used, the finite difference scheme can be easily designed to arbitrary high order accuracy for multi-dimensional 3-T RH equations. The finite difference formulation is also much less expensive in multi-dimensions than finite volume schemes used in [7]. Furthermore, our method can handle fluids with large deformation easily. Numerous 1D and 2D numerical examples are presented to verify the desired properties of the high order finite difference WENO schemes such as high order accuracy, non-oscillation, conservation and adaptation to severely distorted single-material radiation hydrodynamics problems.