We construct and analyze strong stability preserving implicit-explicit Runge-Kutta methods for the time integration of models of flow and radiative transport in astrophysical applications. It turns out that in addition to the optimization of the region of absolute monotonicity, other properties of the methods are crucial for the success of the simulations as well. The models in our focus dictate to also take into account the step-size limits associated with dissipativity and positivity of the stiff parabolic terms which represent transport by diffusion. Another important property is uniform convergence of the numerical approximation with respect to different stiffness of those same terms. Furthermore, it has been argued that in the presence of hyperbolic terms, the stability region should contain a large part of the imaginary axis even though the essentially non-oscillatory methods used for the spatial discretization have eigenvalues with a negative real part. Hence, we construct several new methods which differ from each other by taking various or even all of these constraints simultaneously into account. It is demonstrated for the problem of double-diffusive convection that the newly constructed schemes provide a significant computational advantage over methods from the literature. They may also be useful for general problems which involve the solution of advection-diffusion equations, or other transport equations with similar stability requirements.

We put forward the use of total-variation-diminishing (or more generally, strong stability preserving) implicit-explicit Runge-Kutta methods for the time integration of the equations of motion associated with the semiconvection problem in the simulation of stellar convection. The fully compressible Navier-Stokes equation, augmented by continuity and total energy equations, and an equation of state describing the relation between the thermodynamic quantities, is semi-discretized in space by essentially non-oscillatory schemes and dissipative finite difference methods. It is subsequently integrated in time by Runge-Kutta methods which are constructed such as to preserve the total variation diminishing (or strong stability) property satisfied by the spatial discretization coupled with the forward Euler method. We analyse the stability, accuracy and dissipativity of the time integrators and demonstrate that the most successful methods yield a substantial gain in computational efficiency as compared to classical explicit Runge-Kutta methods.

In astrophysics and meteorology there exist numerous situations where flows exhibit small velocities compared to the sound speed. To overcome the stringent timestep restrictions posed by the predominantly used explicit methods for integration in time the Euler (or Navier-Stokes) equations are usually replaced by modified versions. In astrophysics this is nearly exclusively the anelastic approximation. Kwatra et al. [19] have proposed a method with favourable time-step properties integrating the original equations (and thus allowing, for example, also the treatment of shocks). We describe the extension of the method to the Navier-Stokes and two-component equations. -However, when applying the extended method to problems in convection and double diffusive convection (semiconvection) we ran into numerical difficulties. We describe our procedure for stabilizing the method. We also investigate the behaviour of Kwatra et al.'s method for very low Mach numbers (down to Ma = 0.001) and point out its very favourable properties in this realm for situations where the explicit counterpart of this method returns absolutely unusable results. Furthermore, we show that the method strongly scales over 3 orders of magnitude of processor cores and is limited only by the specific network structure of the high performance computer we use.

Abstract. We report on modelling in stellar astrophysics with the ANTARES code. First, we describe properties of turbulence in solar granulation as seen in high-resolution calculations. Then, we turn to the first 2D model of pulsation-convection interaction in a cepheid. We discuss properties of the outer and the HeII ionization zone. Thirdly, we report on our work regarding models of semiconvection in the context of stellar physics.

We investigate the properties of dissipative full discretizations for the equations of motion associated with models of flow and radiative transport inside stars. We derive dissipative space discretizations and demonstrate that together with specially adapted total‐variation‐diminishing (TVD) or strongly stable Runge‐Kutta time discretizations with adaptive step‐size control this yields reliable and efficient integrators for the underlying high‐dimensional nonlinear evolution equations. For the most general problem class, fully implicit SDIRK methods are demonstrated to be competitive when compared to popular explicit Runge‐Kutta schemes as the additional effort for the solution of the associated nonlinear equations is compensated by the larger step‐sizes admissible for strong stability and dissipativity. For the parameter regime associated with semiconvection we can use partitioned IMEX Runge‐Kutta schemes, where the solution of the implicit part can be reduced to the solution of an elliptic problem. This yields a significant gain in performance as compared to either fully implicit or explicit time integrators. (© 2011 Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)