Continuation of HLLD and MHD Research- Week 7

This week I am continuing to do research on MHD through literature surveys and by going through a lot of the papers that our advisor gave us. Tangentially, I went through a lot of the code on our repository that I was previously not very familiar with since I was working primarily of PIC this semester. While this was going on, we started working on some test cases to pose ASCFD against. However, an issue occurred when I tried to run sections of ASCFD remotely on my desktop. Previously, I have been using a VS code and my own virtual environment for coding. Somehow, when I tried to create another one the run other sections of ASCFD, it completely messed up python on my computer and I spent a long time trouble shooting. I tried reinstalling python on to my computer through power shell, but even that did not solve anything.

While not ideal, I ended up just switching to coding on my laptop on which I reinstalled everything and it seemed to work correctly. Working on my laptop is in some ways more convenient, but the hardware is not nearly as strong as it is on my desktop which increases run time for the simulations. Going forward, I need to find away to restore python and VS code on my desktop, or even possibly switch to an online IDE.

During my research, one thing that particularly stood out to me was a paper that introduced  an Unsplit Staggered Mesh (USM) scheme for solving MHD equations. To summarize it simply, the new scheme incorporates constrained transport methods with high order Godunov fluxes and data reconstruction-evolution algorithms to achieve second order accuracy for MHD solving. The paper also goes into Modified Electric Field Construction (MEC) to deal with some of the issues I talked about in a previously regarding some of the inaccuracies in current HETs simulation.