Student Posters Repository

Radiation hydrodynamics (RHD) is an essential component in numerous scientific simulations like astro-, particle-, and laserphysics and up to this day a challenging field to model with simulations because of its physical complexity as well as its numerical challenges. Particular fields of interest, in which the handling of anisotropic radiation is required are namely star formation, planet formation and supernova research. Finding a scheme that combines the necessary physical complexity while remaining numerically affordable is therefore imperative for simulations in these fields.

Moment methods are popular for radiation hydrodynamics simulations due to their reduced computational cost but have to be used with care, because of the approximations applied in their derivation. This project is about the implementation of a moment method for radiation transport, namely the M1 method into the widely used astrophysical code PLUTO. The crucial advantage of this method over the previously implemented radiation transfer model is its capability to handle anisotropic fields of radiation.
Yet, the additional complexity of the model results in higher demands for computational resources. So far, the scheme is fully parallelized using MPI and the PETSc library  and  tested  in  up  to  three  spatial  dimensions.  First  simulations display the physical advantages of the M1 method and make it a promising tool for further studies. Ongoing work lies in large scale performance evaluation and optimization to increase its usability for scientific studies.