Variational discretizations of viscous and resistive magnetohydrodynamics using structure-preserving finite elements

Abstract: We propose a novel structure preserving discretization for viscous and resistive magnetohydrodynamics. We follow the recent line of work on discrete least action principle for fluid and plasma equation, incorporating the recent advances to model dissipative phenomena through a generalized Lagrange-d Alembert constrained variational principle. We prove that our semi-discrete scheme is equivalent to a metriplectic system and use this property to propose a Poisson splitting time integration. The resulting approximation preserves mass, energy and the divergence constraint of the magnetic field. We then show some numerical results obtained with our approach. We first test our scheme on simple academic test to compare the results with established methodologies, and then focus specifically on the simulation of plasma instabilities, with some tests on non Cartesian geometries to validate our discretization in the scope of tokamak instabilities.