Conservative regularization of neutral fluids and plasmas

Abstract: Ideal systems of equations such as Euler and MHD may develop singular structures like shocks, vortex/current sheets. Among these, vortical singularities arise due to vortex stretching which can lead to unbounded growth of enstrophy. Viscosity and resistivity provide dissipative regularizations of these singularities. In analogy with the dispersive KdV regularization of the 1D inviscid Burgers' equation, we propose a local conservative regularization of ideal 3D compressible flows, MHD and 2-fluid plasmas (with potential applications to high vorticity flows with low dissipation). The regularization involves introducing a vortical twirl' term lambda^2 w x curl w in the velocity equation. The cut-off length lambda must be inversely proportional to square root of density to ensure the conservation of aswirl' energy. The latter includes positive kinetic, compressional, magnetic and vortical contributions, thus leading to a priori bounds on enstrophy. The extension to 2-fluid plasmas involves additionally magnetic `twirl' terms in the ion and electron velocity equations and a solenoidal addition to the current in Ampere's law. A Hamiltonian-Poisson bracket formulation is developed using the swirl energy as Hamiltonian. We also establish a minimality property of the twirl regularization. A swirl velocity field is shown to transport vortex and magnetic flux tubes as well as w/rho and B/rho, thus generalizing the Kelvin-Helmholtz and Alfven theorems. The steady regularized equations are used to model a rotating vortex, MHD pinch and vortex sheet. Our regularization could facilitate numerical simulations and a statistical treatment of vortex and current filaments in 3D. Finally, we briefly describe a conservative regularization of shock-like singularities in compressible flow generalizing both the KdV and nonlinear Schrodinger equations to the adiabatic dynamics of a gas in 3D.