A Flux-Corrected Transport Based Solution Methodology for the Study of Ionospheric Outflow: Application to Open Field Line Problems

Location

Orbital ATK Conference Center

Start Date

5-7-2018 11:25 AM

Description

There are two kinds of ionospheric outflow in nature – the refilling of the plasmasphere following a geomagnetic storm which occurs along closed field lines and polar wind outflow which occurs along open lines. The principle focus of this work is the formulation and development of a hydrodynamic solution methodology for plasma transport through the use of the flux-corrected transport method, a numerical method that is very well suited to handling nonlinear problems with shocks and discontinuities. The newly-developed model has been applied to both the plasmaspheric refilling problem and the polar wind outflow problem and extremely good agreement has been obtained with analytical benchmarks and experimental observations. We believe that with additional development, the same methodology can also be applied to the study of other complex space plasma modeling problems in open and closed flux tube geometries.

Comments

Session 4

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May 7th, 11:25 AM

A Flux-Corrected Transport Based Solution Methodology for the Study of Ionospheric Outflow: Application to Open Field Line Problems

Orbital ATK Conference Center

There are two kinds of ionospheric outflow in nature – the refilling of the plasmasphere following a geomagnetic storm which occurs along closed field lines and polar wind outflow which occurs along open lines. The principle focus of this work is the formulation and development of a hydrodynamic solution methodology for plasma transport through the use of the flux-corrected transport method, a numerical method that is very well suited to handling nonlinear problems with shocks and discontinuities. The newly-developed model has been applied to both the plasmaspheric refilling problem and the polar wind outflow problem and extremely good agreement has been obtained with analytical benchmarks and experimental observations. We believe that with additional development, the same methodology can also be applied to the study of other complex space plasma modeling problems in open and closed flux tube geometries.