An implicit scheme with memory reduction technique for steady state solutions of DVBE in all flow regimes

Abstract

High consumption of memory and computational effort is the major barrier to prevent the widespread use of the discrete velocity method (DVM) in the simulation of flows in all flow regimes. To overcome this drawback, an implicit DVM with a memory reduction technique for solving a steady discrete velocity Boltzmann equation (DVBE) is presented in this work. In the method, the distribution functions in the whole discrete velocity space do not need to be stored, and they are calculated from the macroscopic flow variables. As a result, its memory requirement is in the same order as the conventional Euler/Navier-Stokes solver. In the meantime, it is more efficient than the explicit DVM for the simulation of various flows. To make the method efficient for solving flow problems in all flow regimes, a prediction step is introduced to estimate the local equilibrium state of the DVBE. In the prediction step, the distribution function at the cell interface is calculated by the local solution of DVBE. For the flow simulation, when the cell size is less than the mean free path, the prediction step has almost no effect on the solution. However, when the cell size is much larger than the mean free path, the prediction step dominates the solution so as to provide reasonable results in such a flow regime. In addition, to further improve the computational efficiency of the developed scheme in the continuum flow regime, the implicit technique is also introduced into the prediction step. Numerical results showed that the proposed implicit scheme can provide reasonable results in all flow regimes and increase significantly the computational efficiency in the continuum flow regime as compared with the existing DVM solvers.