Fully decoupled, linear and unconditionally energy stable time discretization scheme for solving the magneto-hydrodynamic equations (Q2293644)

The present paper is devoted to the numerical approximation of incompressible magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) equations, which are nothing else but a coupled system of the Navier-Stokes and Maxwell equations. The authors affirm that the main challenging issue in the numerical solution of MHD equations is to develop an appropriate time discretization. This is the main topic of this manuscript. The authors aim at designing energy stable schemes, in the sense of the discrete energy dissipation. If the resulting method is easy to implement, it will be an additional advantage of the scheme. The method proposed by the authors employs the following ingredients: (i) an auxiliary intermediate velocity variable; (ii) the projection method; and (iii) implicit-explicit treatments to discretize nonlinear terms. The resulting scheme turns out to be of the first order. Then, the authors prove its unconditional energy stability and its convergence along with the optimal error estimate for the pressure. The manuscript is concluded with several numerical tests using the inf-sup stable \(\mathbb{P}_2/\mathbb{P}_1\) finite elements. These tests have the goal to demonstrate scheme's accuracy and stability. Finally, a physical benchmark problem on the hydromagnetic Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is presented.