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Numerical schemes provably preserving the positivity of density and pressure are highly desirable for ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), but the rigorous positivity-preserving (PP) analysis remains challenging. The difficulties mainly arise from the intrinsic complexity of the MHD equations as well as the indeterminate relation between the PP property and the divergence-free condition on the magnetic field. This paper presents the first rigorous PP analysis of conservative schemes with the Lax--Friedrichs (LF) flux for 1D and multidimensional ideal MHD. The significant innovation is the discovery of the theoretical connection between the PP property and a discrete divergence-free (DDF) condition. This connection is established through the generalized LF splitting properties, which are alternatives to the usually expected LF splitting property that does not hold for ideal MHD. The generalized LF splitting properties involve a number of admissible states strongly coupled by the DDF condition, making their derivation very difficult. We derive these properties via a novel equivalent form of the admissible state set and an important inequality, which is skillfully constructed by technical estimates. Rigorous PP analysis is then presented for finite volume and discontinuous Galerkin schemes with the LF flux on uniform Cartesian meshes. In the 1D case, the PP property is proved for the first-order scheme with proper numerical viscosity, and also for arbitrarily high-order schemes under conditions accessible by a PP limiter. In the 2D case, we show that the DDF condition is necessary and crucial for achieving the PP property. It is observed that even slightly violating the proposed DDF condition may cause failure to preserve the positivity of pressure. We prove that the 2D LF type scheme with proper numerical viscosity preserves both the positivity and the DDF condition. Sufficient conditions are derived for 2D PP high-order schemes, and extension to 3D is discussed. Numerical examples provided in the supplementary material further confirm the theoretical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a rigorous numerical analysis for a bounded artificial viscosity model (τ = μδσa(δ∥∇su∥F )∇su) for the numerical simulation of turbulent flows. In practice, the commonly used Smagorinsky model (τ = (csδ)2∥∇su∥F ∇su) is overly dissipative and yields unphysical results. To date, several methods for "clipping" the Smagorinsky viscosity have proven useful in improving the physical characteristics of the simulated flow. However, such heuristic strategies strongly rely upon a priori knowledge of the flow regime. The bounded artificial viscosity model relies on a highly nonlinear, but monotone and smooth, semilinear elliptic form for the artificial viscosity. For this model, we have introduced a variational computational strategy, provided finite element error convergence estimates, and included several computational examples indicating its improvement on the overly diffusive Smagorinsky model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]