Structure-preserving operators for thermal-nonequilibrium hydrodynamics

Radiation hydrodynamics simulations based on a single fluid two-temperature model may violate the law of energy conservation, because the governing equations are expressed in a nonconservative formulation. In this study, we maintain the important physical requirements by employing a strategy based on the key concept that mathematical structures associated with conservative and nonconservative equations are preserved, even at the discrete level. To this end, we discretize the conservation laws and transform them using exact algebraic operations. The proposed scheme maintains global conservation errors within the round-off level. In addition, a numerical experiment concerning the shock tube problem suggests that the proposed scheme agrees well with the jump conditions at the discontinuities regulated by the Rankine–Hugoniot relationship. The generalized derivation allows us to employ arbitrary central difference, artificial dissipation, and Runge–Kutta methods.