Virginia Hydrodynamics 1 (VH-1)

A strongly-perturbed supernova at t=1 hour.

[ You probably want this version of VH-1 instead of mine, I haven't done much astrophysics since 1995. -- greg ]

VH-1 is an implementation of the piecewise parabolic method (PPM) of Colella and Woodward. We have implemented Lagrangian Remap; if you would like to look at a Direct Eulerian implementation, look at Tomasz Plewa's code.

PPM is a technique used for compressible, non-turbulent hydrodynamics. It has been used in a variety of astrophysical contexts, in addition to some ideal gas computations and studies of convection. We are collecting a list of papers that use VH-1 for computations. In addition, we have a list of references which discuss implementation issues for PPM and test cases. Other implementations of PPM are being used by other groups of researchers. As far as I know, only VH-1, Tomasz's implementation, and whatever ZEUS-3D has in it are publicly available. I believe that Paul Woodward has made his code available to some people; write him for details.

The version that we distribute is a subset of everything we've done with the code. It does include 1D, 2D, 3D, 1D self-gravity, shock flattening, spherical and cylindrical geometries, and angular momentum. It does not include artificial viscosity, 2D or 3D self-gravity, multiple fluids, a variable gamma equation of state, or radiative heating or cooling. A large number of test case initializations are included. We highly recommend that you be familiar with numerical hydrodynamics before you attempt to use VH-1, or that you plan on spending a large amount of time learning hydro before you believe anything.

For more information about VH-1, please contact me at the address below. Here is a copy of the VH-1 User's Manual in pdf and postscript.