Radiation-hydrodynamics with MPI-AMRVAC. Flux-limited diffusion

Radiation controls the dynamics and energetics of many astrophysical environments. To capture the coupling between the radiation and matter, however, is often a physically complex and computationally expensive endeavour. We develop a numerical tool to perform radiation-hydrodynamics simulations in various configurations at an affordable cost. We build upon the finite volume code MPI-AMRVAC to solve the equations of hydrodynamics on multi-dimensional adaptive meshes and introduce a new module to handle the coupling with radiation. A non-equilibrium, flux-limiting diffusion approximation is used to close the radiation momentum and energy equations. The time-dependent radiation energy equation is then solved within a flexible framework, accounting fully for radiation forces and work terms and further allowing the user to adopt a variety of descriptions for the radiation-matter interaction terms (the 'opacities'). We validate the radiation module on a set of standard testcases for which different terms of the radiative energy equation predominate. As a preliminary application to a scientific case, we calculate spherically symmetric models of the radiation-driven and optically thick supersonic outflows from massive Wolf-Rayet stars. This also demonstrates our code's flexibility, as the illustrated simulation combines opacities typically used in static stellar structure models with a parametrised form for the enhanced line-opacity expected in supersonic flows. This new module provides a convenient and versatile tool to perform multi-dimensional and high resolution radiative-hydrodynamics simulations in optically thick environments with the MPI-AMRVAC code. The code is ready to be used for a variety of astrophysical applications, where a first target for us will be multi-dimensional simulations of stellar outflows from Wolf-Rayet stars.