Relativistic Flows Using Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Structured Mesh Refinement. I. Hydrodynamics

Astrophysical relativistic flow problems require high resolution three-dimensional numerical simulations. In this paper, we describe a new parallel three-dimensional code for simulations of special relativistic hydrodynamics (SRHD) using both spatially and temporally structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). We used method of lines to discrete SRHD equations spatially and used a total variation diminishing (TVD) Runge-Kutta scheme for time integration. For spatial reconstruction, we have implemented piecewise linear method (PLM), piecewise parabolic method (PPM), third order convex essentially non-oscillatory (CENO) and third and fifth order weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes. Flux is computed using either direct flux reconstruction or approximate Riemann solvers including HLL, modified Marquina flux, local Lax-Friedrichs flux formulas and HLLC. The AMR part of the code is built on top of the cosmological Eulerian AMR code enzo, which uses the Berger-Colella AMR algorithm and is parallel with dynamical load balancing using the widely available Message Passing Interface library. We discuss the coupling of the AMR framework with the relativistic solvers and show its performance on eleven test problems. Subject headings: hydrodynamics–methods:numerical–relativity