Practical Effects of Integrating Temperature with Strang Split Reactions

Abstract

Abstract Many astrophysical environments involve convective or explosive flows driven by thermonuclear reactions (Type Ia supernovae, classical novae, X-ray bursts, stellar evolution). Simulation codes need to accurately capture the interactions between reactions and hydrodynamics to produce realistic models of these events. For astrophysical reacting flows, operator splitting is commonly used to couple hydrodynamics and reactions. Each process operates independent of one another, but by staggering the updates in a symmetric fashion (via Strang splitting) second order accuracy in time can be achieved. However, approximations are often made to the reacting system, including the choice of whether or not to integrate temperature with the species. Here we demonstrate through a simple convergence test that integrating an energy equation together with reactions achieves the best convergence when modeling reactive flows with Strang splitting. Additionally, second order convergence cannot be achieved without integrating an energy or temperature equation.