Thermal conduction in a 2-D FCT plasma hydrodynamic code Original Research Article

This paper presents an algorithm for inclusion of thermal conduction in a 2-D hydrodynamic code for compressible inviscid plasmas. The code is flexible for a wide series of applications in astrophysics, solves the hydrodynamic equations in conservative form in the most used coordinate systems and is based on an explicit fully 2-D flux corrected transport technique (FCT). The algorithm separates the energy equation in two distinct sections, characterized by different integration time steps (time splitting). The dynamic section is solved with the usual FCT scheme; the thermal section is solved using an implicit alternating-direction numerical scheme, which ensures unconditional numerical stability. The formulation is such to describe the plasma energy evolution also in non-uniformly spaced grids and in different coordinate systems. A whole set of tests of increasing complexity are presented to check the accuracy of the code.