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| Paper: |
Modeling the Multi-component Solar Wind:
A few Numerical Aspects and Potential Applications to Stellar Winds |
| Volume: |
459, 6th International Conference of Numerical Modeling of Space Plasma Flows (ASTRONUM 2011) |
| Page: |
216 |
| Authors: |
Li, B.; Li, X. |
| Abstract: |
Being intrinsically multi-dimensional and involving the transition from the
collision-dominated to collisionless regime, the solar wind proves challenging to
model in a number of numerical aspects. We present a consistent numerical
scheme that efficiently handles an axisymmetric, multi-component solar wind, and readily incorporates such effects as wave heating and field-aligned
electron heat flux. The scheme conserves the mass, momentum and energy of the
system to a high accuracy. We examine the difficulty associated with the
introduction of a third species, namely alpha particles, into a proton-electron wind.
This difficulty originates from the occurrence of an ion gyro-frequency in a fluid
system, and can be readily resolved by adopting an operator-splitting approach
whereby this gyro-motion term is advanced with the classical Boris scheme in particle simulations.
In addition to presenting representative numerical results so far obtained, we also briefly discuss
the potential application of this scheme to radiatively driven winds from
late O or early B stars. |
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