Abstract. Two-fluid ideal plasma equations are a generalized form of the ideal MHD equations in which electrons and ions are considered as separate species. The design of efficient numerical schemes for the these equations is complicated on account of their non-linear nature and the presence of stiff source terms, especially for high charge to mass ratios and for low Larmor radii. In this article, we design entropy stable finite difference schemes for the two-fluid equations by combining entropy conservative fluxes and suitable numerical diffusion operators. Furthermore, to overcome the time step restrictions imposed by the stiff source terms, we devise time-stepping routines based on implicit-explicit (IMEX)-Runge Kutta (RK) schemes. The special structure of the two-fluid plasma equations is exploited by us to design IMEX schemes in which only local (in each cell) linear equations need to be solved at each time step. Benchmark numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the robustness and accuracy of these schemes.

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Two-fluid plasma equations are derived by taking moments of Boltzmann equations. Ignoring collisions and viscous terms and assuming local thermodynamic equilibrium we get five moment equations for each species (electrons and ions), known as two-fluid plasma equations. These equations allow different temperatures and velocities for electrons and ions, unlike ideal magnetohydrodynamics equations. In this article, we present robust second order MUSCL schemes for two-fluid plasma equations based on Strang splitting of the flux and source terms. The source is treated both explicitly and implicitly. These schemes are shown to preserve positivity of the pressure and density. In the case of explicit treatment of source term, we derive explicit condition on the time step for it to be positivity preserving. The implicit treatment of the source term is shown to preserve positivity, unconditionally. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of these schemes.

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