A Proper Discretization of Hydrodynamic Equations in the Cylindrical Coordinates for Astrophysical Simulations

Abstract

Cylindrical coordinates are often used in computational fluid dynamics, in particular, when one considers gas flow accreting onto a central object. Although the cylindrical coordinates have several advantages in describing rotation, they have apparent singularity along the axis at the coordinate origin (z-axis). This singularity introduces difficulties in numerical simulations. First, it is difficult to reproduce the flow across the z-axis. Second, the time step is extremely shortened by the CFL condition near the z-axis because the numerical cell thereof is narrow in the azimuthal direction for a given angular resolution. Here, we propose a new discretization scheme to overcome these difficulties. In our new scheme, we consider changes in the direction of the unit vector within a cell when evaluating the flux across each cell surface. Besides, we evaluate the source term in the radial component of the momentum equation from the thermal and dynamic pressures working on the azimuthal cell surface. The new scheme is designed to be free-stream preserving so that flow with uniform density, pressure, and velocity isan exact solution of the discretized equation. These improvements are essential to using a lower angular resolution in the innermost area and thus to elongate each time step. Our examples demonstrate that the innermost circular region around the axis can be resolved by only six numerical cells. We present an application to an accreting compact star surrounded by a disk, in addition to Sod shock tube and rotating outflow tests.