Hydrodynamic simulations of He-shell flash convection

We present the first hydrodynamic, multi-dimensional simulations of He-shell flash convection. Specifically, we investigate the properties of shell convection at a time immediately before the He-luminosity peak during the 15 thermal pulse of a stellar evolution track with initially two solar masses and metallicity Z = 0.01. This choice is a representative example of a low-mass asymptotic giant branch thermal pulse. We construct the initial vertical stratification with a set of polytropes to resemble the stellar evolution structure. Convection is driven by a constant volume heating in a thin layer at the bottom of the unstable layer. We calculate a grid of 2D simulations with different resolutions and heating rates. Our set of simulations includes one low-resolution 3D run. The computational domain includes 11.4 pressure scale heights. He-shell flash convection is dominated by large convective cells that are centered in the lower half of the convection zone. Convective rolls have an almost circular appearance because focusing mechanisms exist in the form of the density stratification for downdrafts and the heating of localized eddies that generate upflows. Nevertheless, downdrafts appear to be somewhat more focused. The He-shell flash convection generates a rich spectrum of gravity waves in both stable layers above and beneath the convective shell. The magnitude of the convective velocities from our 1D mixinglength theory model and the rms-averaged vertical velocities from the hydrodynamic model are consistent within a factor of a few. However, the velocity profile in the hydrodynamic simulation is more asymmetric, and decays exponentially inside the convection zone. An analysis of the oscillation modes shows that both g-modes and convective motions cross the formal convective boundaries, which leads to mixing across the boundaries. Our resolution study shows consistent flow structures among the higher resolution runs, and we see indications for convergence of the vertical velocity profile inside the convection zone for the highest resolution simulations. Many of the convective properties, in particular the exponential decay of the velocities, depend only weakly on the heating rate. However, the amplitudes of the gravity waves increase with both the heating rate and the resolution.