A divergence-free semi-implicit finite volume scheme for ideal, viscous and resistive magnetohydrodynamics

In this paper we present a novel pressure-based semi-implicit finite volume solver for the equations of compressible ideal, viscous and resistive magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). The new method is conservative for mass, momentum and total energy and in multiple space dimensions it is constructed in such a way as to respect the divergence-free condition of the magnetic field exactly, also in the presence of resistive effects. This is possible via the use of multi-dimensional Riemann solvers on an appropriately staggered grid for the time evolution of the magnetic field and a double curl formulation of the resistive terms. The new semi-implicit method for the MHD equations proposed here discretizes all terms related to the pressure in the momentum equation and the total energy equation implicitly, making again use of a properly staggered grid for pressure and velocity. The time step of the scheme is restricted by a CFL condition based only on the fluid velocity and the Alfvén wave speed and is not based on the speed of the magnetosonic waves. Our new method is particularly well-suited for low Mach number flows and for the incompressible limit of the MHD equations, for which it is well-known that explicit density-based Godunov-type finite volume solvers become increasingly inefficient and inaccurate due to the increasingly stringent CFL condition and the wrong scaling of the numerical viscosity in the incompressible limit. We show a relevant MHD test problem in the low Mach number regime where the new semi-implicit algorithm is a factor of 50 faster than a traditional explicit finite volume method, which is a very significant gain in terms of computational efficiency. However, our numerical results confirm that our new method performs well also for classical MHD test cases with strong shocks. In this sense our new scheme is a true all Mach number flow solver.