A comparative study of discrete velocity methods for low-speed rarefied gas flows

In the study of rarefied gas dynamics, the discrete velocity method (DVM) has been widely employed to solve the gas kinetic equations. Although various versions of DVM have been developed, their performance, in terms of modeling accuracy and computational efficiency, is yet to be comprehensively studied in all the flow regimes. Here, the traditional third-order time-implicit Godunov DVM (GDVM) and the recently developed discrete unified gas-kinetic scheme (DUGKS) are analysed in finding steady-state solutions of the low-speed force-driven Poiseuille and lid-driven cavity flows. With the molecular collision and free streaming being treated simultaneously, the DUGKS preserves the second-order accuracy in the spatial and temporal discretizations in all flow regimes. Towards the hydrodynamic flow regime, not only is the DUGKS faster than the GDVM when using the same spatial mesh, but also requires less spatial resolution than that of the GDVM to achieve the same numerical accuracy. From the slip to free molecular flow regimes, however, the DUGKS is slower than the GDVM, due to the complicated flux evaluation and the restrictive time step which is smaller than the maximum effective time step of the GDVM. Therefore, the DUGKS is preferable for problems involving different flow regimes, particularly when the hydrodynamic flow regime is dominant. For highly rarefied gas flows, if the steady-state solution is mainly concerned, the implicit GDVM, which can boost the convergence significantly, is a better choice

Well-balanced and asymptotic preserving schemes for kinetic models

In this paper, we propose a general framework for designing numerical schemes that have both well-balanced (WB) and asymptotic preserving (AP) properties, for various kinds of kinetic models. We are interested in two different parameter regimes, 1) When the ratio between the mean free path and the characteristic macroscopic length $\epsilon$ tends to zero, the density can be described by (advection) diffusion type (linear or nonlinear) macroscopic models; 2) When $\epsilon$ = O(1), the models behave like hyperbolic equations with source terms and we are interested in their steady states. We apply the framework to three different kinetic models: neutron transport equation and its diffusion limit, the transport equation for chemotaxis and its Keller-Segel limit, and grey radiative transfer equation and its nonlinear diffusion limit. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the properties of the schemes

General synthetic iterative scheme for nonlinear gas kinetic simulation of multi-scale rarefied gas flows

The general synthetic iteration scheme (GSIS) is extended to find the steady-state solution of nonlinear gas kinetic equation, removing the long-standing problems of slow convergence and requirement of ultra-fine grids in near-continuum flows. The key ingredients of GSIS are that the gas kinetic equation and macroscopic synthetic equations are tightly coupled, and the constitutive relations in macroscopic synthetic equations explicitly contain Newton's law of shear stress and Fourier's law of heat conduction. The higher-order constitutive relations describing rarefaction effects are calculated from the velocity distribution function, however, their constructions are simpler than our previous work (Su et al. Journal of Computational Physics 407 (2020) 109245) for linearized gas kinetic equations. On the other hand, solutions of macroscopic synthetic equations are used to inform the evolution of gas kinetic equation at the next iteration step. A rigorous linear Fourier stability analysis in periodic system shows that the error decay rate of GSIS can be smaller than 0.5, which means that the deviation to steady-state solution can be reduced by 3 orders of magnitude in 10 iterations. Other important advantages of the GSIS are (i) it does not rely on the specific form of Boltzmann collision operator and (ii) it can be solved by sophisticated techniques in computational fluid dynamics, making it amenable to large scale engineering applications. In this paper, the efficiency and accuracy of GSIS is demonstrated by a number of canonical test cases in rarefied gas dynamics.Comment: 25 pages, 17 figures; Version 3, major revision of text and reformed/re-organized equations, added numerical analysis but numerical results are not change