Locally adaptive artificial viscosity strategies for Lagrangian hydrodynamics

•New method for constructing an adaptive, artificial viscosity in the context of one-dimensional, staggered-grid Lagrangian hydrodynamics.•The adaptive, artificial viscosity depends locally on density in a neighborhood around the shock.•The algorithm to compute the adaptive coefficient is automated using a data-driven approach based on a set of optimal reference values for isolated shocks.•This methodology produces more accurate results for a variety of tests with propagating shock waves. To accurately model inviscid flow with shock waves using staggered-grid Lagrangian hydrodynamics, artificial viscosity is introduced to convert kinetic energy into internal energy, thereby providing a mechanism to generate the required entropy increase across shocks. In this paper, we propose a new method for constructing an adaptive, artificial viscosity in the context of one-dimensional, staggered-grid Lagrangian hydrodynamics. Our adaptive, artificial viscosity is defined in terms of two parameters that depend on density locally in a neighborhood around a shock, and hence, vary cell-by-cell. Our methodology is based on building a reference set of pre-computed optimal, globally constant artificial viscosity coefficients for a family of isolated shock test problems. For arbitrary flows, the evaluation of the unknown coefficients is automated by first estimating shock intensity locally, and second computing the corresponding adaptive parameter value via interpolation over the data from the pre-computed reference set of optimal, globally constant coefficient values. To illustrate the performance of our new approach, we compare our results against two existing methods. The first method is a limiter-based approach, which relies on estimating velocity gradients of the flow, and the second method is utilized in several commercial codes. We demonstrate that our new adaptive methodology produces more accurate results for a variety of tests with propagating shock waves, as well as for the aforementioned family of isolated shock problems.