Micro-Macro Schemes for Kinetic Equations Including Boundary Layers

Abstract

We introduce a new micro-macro decomposition of collisional kinetic equations in the specific case of the diffusion limit, which naturally incorporates the incoming boundary conditions. The idea is to write the distribution function $f$ in all its domain as the sum of an equilibrium adapted to the boundary (which is not the usual equilibrium associated with $f$) and a remaining kinetic part. This equilibrium is defined such that its incoming velocity moments coincide with the incoming velocity moments of the distribution function. A consequence of this strategy is that no artificial boundary condition is needed in the micro-macro models and the exact boundary condition on $f$ is naturally transposed to the macro part of the model. This method provides an “asymptotic preserving” numerical scheme that generates a very good approximation of the space boundary values at the diffusive limit, without any mesh refinement in the boundary layers. Our numerical results are in very good agreement with the exact so-called Chandrasekhar value, which is explicitly known in some simple cases.