Search

A detailed description of GENE-3D, a newly developed global stellarator version of the well established gyrokinetic turbulence code GENE, is provided – along with some initial simulation results. First, the underlying gyrokinetic equations and the use of field-aligned coordinates in non-axisymmetric magnetohydrodynamic equilibria are discussed. Then, various aspects regarding the numerical implementation in GENE-3D are described. Finally, the code is validated and its parallel performance is assessed, along with the influence of numerical precision.

We propose a new, energy conserving, spectral element, discontinuous Galerkin method for the approximation of the Vlasov–Poisson system in arbitrary dimension, using Cartesian grids. The method is derived from the one proposed in [4] , with two modifications: energy conservation is obtained by a suitable projection operator acting on the solution of the Poisson problem, rather than by solving multiple Poisson problems, and all the integrals appearing in the finite element formulation are approximated with Gauss–Lobatto quadrature, thereby yielding a spectral element formulation. The resulting method has the following properties: exact energy conservation (up to errors introduced by the time discretization), stability (thanks to the use of upwind numerical fluxes), high order accuracy and high locality. For the time discretization, we consider both Runge–Kutta methods and exponential integrators, and show results for 1D and 2D cases (2D and 4D in phase space, respectively).

Non-hydrostatic Unified Model of the Atmosphere (NUMA) The first NUMA papers appeared in 2008. From 2008 through 2010, all the NUMA papers appearing involved the 2D (x-z slice) Euler equations. All the theory and numerical implementations were first developed in 2D. We present spectral element (SE) and discontinuous Galerkin (DG) solutions of the Euler and compressible Navier– Stokes (NS) equations for stratified fluid flow which are of importance in nonhydrostatic mesoscale atmospheric modeling. We study three different forms of the governing equations using seven test cases. Three test cases involve flow over moun- tains which require the implementation of non-reflecting boundary conditions, while one test requires viscous terms (den- sity current). Including viscous stresses into finite difference, finite element, or spectral element models poses no additional challenges; however, including these terms to either finite volume or discontinuous Galerkin models requires the introduc- tion of additional machinery because these methods were originally designed for first-order operators. We use the local discontinuous Galerkin method to overcome this obstacle. The seven test cases show that all of our models yield good results. The main conclusion is that equation set 1 (non-conservation form) does not perform as well as sets 2 and 3 (con- servation forms). For the density current (viscous), the SE and DG models using set 3 (mass and total energy) give less dissipative results than the other equation sets; based on these results we recommend set 3 for the development of future multiscale research codes. In addition, the fact that set 3 conserves both mass and energy up to machine precision motives us to pursue this equation set for the development of future mesoscale models. For the bubble and mountain tests, the DG models performed better. Based on these results and due to its conservation properties we recommend the DG method. In the worst case scenario, the DG models are 50% slower than the non-conservative SE models. In the best case scenario, the DG models are just as efficient as the conservative SE models.