An exact divergence-free spectral method for incompressible and resistive magneto-hydrodynamic equations in two and three dimensions

In this paper, we present exact divergence-free spectral method for solving the incompressible and resistive magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) equations in two and three dimensions, as well as the efficient solution algorithm and unconditionally energy-stable fully-discretized numerical schemes. We introduce new ideas of constructing two families of exact divergence-free vectorial spectral basis functions on domains diffeomorphic to squares or cubes. These bases are obtained with the help of orthogonality and derivative relation of generalised Jacobi polynomials, several de Rham complexes, as well as the property of contravariant Piola transformation. They are well-suited for discretizing the velocity and magnetic fields, respectively, thereby ensuring point-wise preservation of the incompressibility condition and the magnetic Gauss's law. With the aid of these bases, we propose a family of exact divergence-free implicit-explicit $k$-step backward differentiation formula (DF-BDF-$k$) fully-discretized schemes for the MHD system. These schemes naturally decouple the pressure field from the velocity field. Consequently, the stability of the space-time fully-discretized numerical schemes based on these bases are significantly enhanced. These schemes exhibit unconditional stability for $k=1,2$, and demonstrate exceptional stability and accuracy for $k=3,4$, verified with extensive numerical results for long time simulations using large time step sizes. Furthermore, we present efficient solution algorithms for these two decoupled equations for the velocity and magnetic fields, respectively, by exploiting the sparsity and structure of the resultant linear algebraic systems. Ample numerical examples in two and three dimensions are provided to demonstrate the distinctive accuracy, efficiency and stability of our proposed method.