Adaptive Mesh Refinement for Supersonic Molecular Cloud Turbulence

We performed a series of three-dimensional numerical simulations of supersonic homogeneous Euler turbulence with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and effective grid resolution up to 10243 zones. Our experiments describe nonmagnetized driven supersonic turbulent flows with an isothermal equation of state. Mesh refinement on shocks and shear is implemented to cover dynamically important structures with the highest resolution subgrids and calibrated to match the turbulence statistics obtained from the equivalent uniform grid simulations. We found that at a level of resolution slightly below 5123, when a sufficient integral/dissipation scale separation is first achieved, the fraction of the box volume covered by the AMR subgrids first becomes smaller than unity. At the higher AMR levels subgrids start covering smaller and smaller fractions of the whole volume, which scale with the Reynolds number as Re−1/4. We demonstrate the consistency of this scaling with a hypothesis that the most dynamically important structures in intermittent supersonic turbulence are strong shocks with a fractal dimension of two. We show that turbulence statistics derived from AMR simulations and simulations performed on uniform grids agree surprisingly well, even though only a fraction of the volume is covered by AMR subgrids. Based on these results, we discuss the signature of dissipative structures in the statistical properties of supersonic turbulence and their role in overall flow dynamics. Subject headings: ISM: structure — ISM: clouds — hydrodynamics — turbulence — methods: numerical