An upwind CESE scheme for 2D and 3D MHD numerical simulation in general curvilinear coordinates

Shen et al. [1,2] proposed an upwind space-time conservation element and solution element (CESE) scheme for 1D and 2D hydrodynamics (HD) in rectangular coordinates, which combined the advantages of CESE and upwind scheme, namely, guaranteed strictly the space-time conservation law as well as captured discontinuities very efficiently. All kinds of upwind schemes can be combined very flexibly for different problems to achieve the perfect combination of CESE and finite volume method (FVM). However, in many physical applications, we need to consider geometries that are more sophisticated. Hence, the main objective of this paper is to extend the upwind CESE scheme to multidimensional magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD) in general curvilinear coordinates by transforming the MHD equations from the physical domain (general curvilinear coordinates) to the computational domain (rectangular coordinates) and the new equations in the computational domain can be still written in the conservation form. For the 3D case, the derivations of some formulas are much more abstract and complex in a 4D Euclidean hyperspace, and some technical problems need to be solved in the debugging process. Unlike in HD, keeping the magnetic field divergence-free for MHD problems is also a challenge especially in general curvilinear coordinates. These are the main obstacles we have overcome in this study. The test results of benchmarks demonstrate that we have successfully extended the upwind CESE scheme to general curvilinear coordinates for both 2D and 3D MHD problems. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.