Numerical simulations of white dwarf accretion disks

For a slowly rotating weakly magnetized white dwarf nearly half of the accretion energy is released in the thin boundary layer around the equator when the disk matter impacts and dissipates its kinetic energy as it comes into corotation with the surface. The mixing of the accreted material with the stellar surface layers as well as the observable spectral distribution of the resulting radiation depend on the structure of the boundary layer which is determined by the viscous interaction of the matter and the resulting heat dissipation as well as the radiative transport.

In this paper we investigate different white dwarf accretion disk models by solving the Navier-Stokes equations together with a flux-limited diffusion approximation for the radiation transport.

This work is sponsored by the Joint Institute of Nuclear Astrophysics (http://www.JINAweb.org) under NSF-PFC grant PHY02-16783