Radial Stellar Pulsation and Three-dimensional Convection. I. Numerical Methods and Adiabatic Test Cases

We are developing a three-dimensional radiation hydrodynamics code to simulate the interaction of convection and pulsation in classical variable stars. One key goal is the ability to carry these simulations to full amplitude in order to compare them with observed light and velocity curves. Previous two-dimensional calculations were prevented from doing this because of drift in the radial coordinate system, due to the algorithm defining radial movement of the coordinate system during the pulsation cycle. We remove this difficulty by defining our coordinate system flow algorithm to require that the mass in a spherical shell remains constant throughout the pulsation cycle. We perform adiabatic test calculations to show that large amplitude solutions repeat over more than 150 pulsation periods. We also verify that the computational method conserves the peak kinetic energy per period, as must be true for adiabatic pulsation models.