A hybrid discrete exterior calculus and finite difference method for Boussinesq convection in spherical shells

DOI10.1016/J.JCP.2023.112397MaRDI QIDQ6071553zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Bhargav Mantravadi, Pankaj Jagad, R. Samtaney

Publication date 27 November 2023

Published in Journal of Computational Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.00861

zbMATH Keywords

Boussinesq convectiondiscrete exterior calculusfinite difference methodflow in spherical shelloperator splittingPETSc

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

General theory of differentiable manifolds (58Axx) Numerical methods for partial differential equations, initial value and time-dependent initial-boundary value problems (65Mxx) Basic methods in fluid mechanics (76Mxx)

Abstract: We present a new hybrid discrete exterior calculus (DEC) and finite difference (FD) method to simulate fully three-dimensional Boussinesq convection in spherical shells subject to internal heating and basal heating, relevant in the planetary and stellar phenomenon. We employ DEC to compute the surface spherical flows, taking advantage of its unique features of structure preservation (e.g., conservation of secondary quantities like kinetic energy) and coordinate system independence, while we discretize the radial direction using FD method. The grid employed for this novel method is free of problems like the coordinate singularity, grid non-convergence near the poles, and the overlap regions. We have developed a parallel in-house code using the PETSc framework to verify the hybrid DEC-FD formulation and demonstrate convergence. We have performed a series of numerical tests which include quantification of the critical Rayleigh numbers for spherical shells characterized by aspect ratios ranging from 0.2 to 0.8, simulation of robust convective patterns in addition to stationary giant spiral roll covering all the spherical surface in moderately thin shells near the weakly nonlinear regime, and the quantification of Nusselt and Reynolds numbers for basally heated spherical shells. The method exhibits slightly better than second order error convergence with the mesh size.

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Cited in

(1)

• A hybrid discrete exterior calculus and finite difference method for anelastic convection in spherical shells

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