Compressible Hydrodynamic Mean-Field Equations in Spherical Geometry and their Application to Turbulent Stellar Convection Data

21 Jan 2014  ·  Miroslav Mocák, Casey Meakin, Maxime Viallet, David Arnett ·

We present a statistical analysis of turbulent convection in stars within our Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) framework in spherical geometry which we derived from first principles. The primary results reported in this document include: (1) an extensive set of mean-field equations for compressible, multi-species hydrodynamics, and (2) corresponding mean-field data computed from various simulation models. Some supplementary scale analysis data is also presented. The simulation data which is presented includes: (1) shell convection during oxygen burning in a 23 solar mass supernova progenitor, (2) envelope convection in a 5 solar mass red giant, (3) shell convection during the helium flash, and (4) a hydrogen injection flash in a 1.25 solar mass star. These simulations have been partially described previously in Meakin [2006], Meakin and Arnett [2007a,b, 2010], Arnett et al. [2009, 2010], Viallet et al. [2011, 2013a,b] and Mocak et al. [2009, 2011]. New data is also included in this document with several new domain and resolution configurations as well as some variations in the physical model such as convection zone depth and driving source term. The long term goal of this work is to aid in the development of more sophisticated models for treating hydrodynamic phenomena (e.g., turbulent convection) in the field of stellar evolution by providing a direct link between 3D simulation data and the mean fields which are modeled by 1D stellar evolution codes. As such, this data can be used to test previously proposed turbulence models found in the literature and sometimes used in stellar modeling. This data can also serve to test basic physical principles for model building and inspire new prescriptions for use in 1D evolution codes.

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Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Fluid Dynamics Geophysics