mesa
mesa copied to clipboard
Implicit mass accretion rate can be lareger than mass transfer rate
Describe the bug To avoid repeat calculations of the accretor's mdot, the implicit accretion rate is calculated only in the first iteration and then both explicit and implicit accretion rate will not be updated in the following redos. However, in each redo the mass transfer rate changes and it is possible that the mass transfer rate becomes smaller than the accretion rate.
In addition, in run_binary_support.f90
, there are three conditional statements
if (j == b% a_i .and. b% num_tries >0 .and. s% was_in_implicit_wind_limit)
cycle
where s% should be b% s_accretor% as it should point to the accretor rather than star 2.
To Reproduce Use implicit method to calculate the accretion rate considering the angular momentum transport of the accreted material and the rotation of the star. The input files to reproduce the issue is attached. A small modification in binary_mdot.f90 is for implementing reverse mass transfer with 'Kolb' scheme, see #545. MESA version 11701.
Discussion Currently, the implicit accretion rate is calculated based on the mass transfer rate at the first iteration. The following update of mass transfer rate alone with the update of the donor star are not affecting the accretion rate. Mostly, the impact is not significant, while in some cases, it is noticeable like the example here where the accretion rate becomes larger. However, as discussed in #507, calculating implicit mdot for the accretor every redo can increase the computational time.
Additional context reproduce_implicit_issue.zip