Two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics code simulating LRT's plasma dynamic accelerator

Currently a new magnetohydrodynamics code is under development that will be used to simulate the behavior of a plasma dynamic accelerator with a compressor coil. This code should provide a more thorough understanding of the processes involved in the operation of the accelerator and hopefully will help to improve the accelerator design. The computational region is divided into several subregions that allow the alteration of shape and position in time. Possible subregions are conducting and nonconducting fluid regions, spatially fixed regions with constant conductivity, and vacuum regions. The code uses a phoenical flux corrected transport scheme to advance fluid properties in time, and explicit flux corrected transport to advance the magnetic vector potential in conducting fluid regions in time. In those regions, the electric scalar potential is computed separately. In vacuum regions and nonconducting fluid regions as well as in regions with constant conductivity, such as the compressor coil wire, only the magnetic vector potential is computed. This paper reports the current status of the development of the code and presents its first results.<
>