Extending the Spectral Difference Method with Divergence Cleaning (SDDC) to the Hall MHD Equations

Abstract

The Hall Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations are an extension of the standard MHD equations that include the “Hall” term from the general Ohm’s law. The Hall term decouples ion and electron motion physically on the ion inertial length scales. Implementing the Hall MHD equations in a numerical solver allows more physical simulations for plasma dynamics on length scales less than the ion inertial scale length but greater than the electron inertial length. The present effort is an important step towards producing physically correct results to important problems, such as the Geospace Environmental Modeling (GEM) Magnetic Reconnection problem. The solver that is being modified is currently capable of solving the resistive MHD equations on unstructured grids using the spectral difference scheme which is an arbitrarily high-order method that is relatively simple to parallelize. The GEM Magnetic Reconnection problem is used to evaluate whether the Hall MHD equations have been correctly implemented in the solver using the spectral difference method with divergence cleaning (SDDC) algorithm by comparing against the reconnection rates reported in the literature.