An alternative approach to viscosity in an accretion disc

Abstract

Purely hydrodynamic numerical experiments into the evolution of astrophysical discs typically include some sort of viscosity in order to cause accretion. In this paper, we demonstrate an alternative method of implementing viscous forces, with extremely good angular momentum conservation properties. The method is based on altering the cell fluxes, rather than incorporating a viscous force. We test this method on the classical `ring spreading' problem, and demonstrate angular momentum conservation at the $10^{-8}$ level.