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P.A. Hughes (U. Michigan), M.A. Miller (Washington U.), G.C. Duncan (Bowling Green S. U.), C.M. Swift (U. Michigan)
We present the results of validation runs and the first extragalactic jet simulations performed with a 3D relativistic numerical hydrodynamic code employing a solver of the RHLLE type and using adaptive mesh refinement (AMR; Duncan & Hughes, 1994, Ap. J., 436, L119). Test problems include the shock tube, blast wave and spherical shock reflection (implosion). Trials with the code show that as a consequence of AMR it is viable to perform exploratory runs on workstation class machines (with no more than 128Mb of memory) prior to production runs. In the former case we achieve a resolution not much less than that normally regarded as the minimum needed to capture the essential physics of a problem, which means that such runs can provide valuable guidance allowing the optimum use of supercomputer resources. We present initial results from a program to explore the 3D stability properties of flows previously studied using a 2D axisymmetric code, and our first attempt to explore the structure and morphology of a relativistic jet encountering an ambient density gradient that mimics an ambient inhomogeneity or cloud.