A unified gas-kinetic scheme for continuum and rarefied flows
- Mathematics Department, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon (Hong Kong)
- Department of Merchant Marine, National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung 20224, Taiwan (China)
With discretized particle velocity space, a multiscale unified gas-kinetic scheme for entire Knudsen number flows is constructed based on the BGK model. The current scheme couples closely the update of macroscopic conservative variables with the update of microscopic gas distribution function within a time step. In comparison with many existing kinetic schemes for the Boltzmann equation, the current method has no difficulty to get accurate Navier-Stokes (NS) solutions in the continuum flow regime with a time step being much larger than the particle collision time. At the same time, the rarefied flow solution, even in the free molecule limit, can be captured accurately. The unified scheme is an extension of the gas-kinetic BGK-NS scheme from the continuum flow to the rarefied regime with the discretization of particle velocity space. The success of the method is due to the un-splitting treatment of the particle transport and collision in the evaluation of local solution of the gas distribution function. For these methods which use operator splitting technique to solve the transport and collision separately, it is usually required that the time step is less than the particle collision time. This constraint basically makes these methods useless in the continuum flow regime, especially in the high Reynolds number flow simulations. Theoretically, once the physical process of particle transport and collision is modeled statistically by the kinetic Boltzmann equation, the transport and collision become continuous operators in space and time, and their numerical discretization should be done consistently. Due to its multiscale nature of the unified scheme, in the update of macroscopic flow variables, the corresponding heat flux can be modified according to any realistic Prandtl number. Subsequently, this modification effects the equilibrium state in the next time level and the update of microscopic distribution function. Therefore, instead of modifying the collision term of the BGK model, such as ES-BGK and BGK-Shakhov, the unified scheme can achieve the same goal on the numerical level directly. Many numerical tests will be used to validate the unified method.
- OSTI ID:
- 21418107
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Computational Physics, Vol. 229, Issue 20; Other Information: DOI: 10.1016/j.jcp.2010.06.032; PII: S0021-9991(10)00347-5; Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands, All rights reserved.; ISSN 0021-9991
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
BOLTZMANN EQUATION
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS
HEAT FLUX
KNUDSEN FLOW
MATHEMATICAL SOLUTIONS
NAVIER-STOKES EQUATIONS
PRANDTL NUMBER
REYNOLDS NUMBER
DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
DIMENSIONLESS NUMBERS
EQUATIONS
FLUID FLOW
FUNCTIONS
GAS FLOW
INTEGRO-DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
KINETIC EQUATIONS
PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
SIMULATION