On the Piecewise Parabolic Method for Compressible Flow with Stellar Equations of State

Abstract

The piecewise parabolic method and related schemes are widely used to model stellar flows. Several different methods for extending the validity of these methods to a general equation of state have been proposed over time, but direct comparisons amongst one-another and exact solutions with stellar equations of state are not widely available. We introduce some simple test problems with exact solutions run with a popular stellar equation of state and test how two existing codes with different approaches to incorporating general gases perform. The source code for generating the exact solutions is made available.