Multigroup radiation hydrodynamics with flux-limited diffusion and adaptive mesh refinement

¹ Univ. Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, AIM, UMR 7158, CEA, CNRS, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
e-mail: matthias.gonzalez@cea.fr
² École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, CRAL, UMR CNRS 5574, Université de Lyon, 46 allée d’Italie, 69364 Lyon Cedex 07, France
³ School of Physics, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QL, UK

Received: 26 February 2015
Accepted: 6 April 2015

Abstract

Context. Radiative transfer plays a crucial role in the star formation process. Because of the high computational cost, radiation-hydrodynamics simulations performed up to now have mainly been carried out in the grey approximation. In recent years, multifrequency radiation-hydrodynamics models have started to be developed in an attempt to better account for the large variations in opacities as a function of frequency.

Aims. We wish to develop an efficient multigroup algorithm for the adaptive mesh refinement code RAMSES which is suited to heavy proto-stellar collapse calculations.

Methods. Because of the prohibitive timestep constraints of an explicit radiative transfer method, we constructed a time-implicit solver based on a stabilized bi-conjugate gradient algorithm, and implemented it in RAMSES under the flux-limited diffusion approximation.

Results. We present a series of tests that demonstrate the high performance of our scheme in dealing with frequency-dependent radiation-hydrodynamic flows. We also present a preliminary simulation of a 3D proto-stellar collapse using 20 frequency groups. Differences between grey and multigroup results are briefly discussed, and the large amount of information this new method brings us is also illustrated.

Conclusions. We have implemented a multigroup flux-limited diffusion algorithm in the RAMSES code. The method performed well against standard radiation-hydrodynamics tests, and was also shown to be ripe for exploitation in the computational star formation context.