Adaptive multi-scale and multi-fluid modeling of the solar-atmosphere

The overarching goal of this project is to develop an innovative multi-scale approach for simulating the transport and conversion of vast amounts of energies in different forms within the solar atmosphere, by combining novel self-consistent multi-fluid models with pioneering integrated adaptive procedures. The resulting simulation model will allow for a dynamic adaptation of both the physico-chemical models and the computational mesh in function of the local requirements of accuracy. The method will be applied to clarify recent (and current) observations, i.e. to reveal and better quantify the physical mechanisms causing heating of the solar atmosphere, and the transition of waves and flows through the chromosphere, a relatively narrow layer in the solar atmosphere where the medium jumps from collisional (dense) to collisionless (rare), from neutral (gas) to almost fully ionized (plasma) and increases drastically (by almost three decades!) in temperature. The new multi-domain multi-physics approach will be implemented and validated within a highly flexible and massively parallel numerical infrastructure, able to adaptively select and consistently combine the most suitable models (e.g. two- or three-fluid, multi-ion, chemically reactive or frozen) to be applied locally (in each computational cell) during the simulation. All developments will be integrated into COOLFluiD, a worldclass multi-physics platform already featuring a wide range of plasma models and solvers.