A high-order implicit procedure for the 3-D electric field in complex magnetogasdynamic simulations

An approximately factored compact-difference-based method, up to sixth-order accurate in space, is developed to obtain the electric, field in magnetogasdynamic (MGD) interactions. The three-dimensional current continuity equation is solved on curvilinear meshes for the general case where electrical conductivity is a spatially varying tensor due to the presence of Hall and ion-slip effects. Compatible high-order boundary conditions are described for electrodes and insulators. Several computations verify the formulation, including a test case with an analytic solution and several cases for the potential arising between continuous and segmented electrodes with variable conductivity and velocity profiles. Issues related to the computation of the electric field in the high-speed regime are addressed by computing the initial induced field in a Type IV shock-on-shock interaction under a frozen velocity field assumption. Published by Elsevier Ltd.