Multi-species kinetic-fluid coupling for high-energy density simulations

Abstract

Many physics problems are subject to a mix of continuum and non-equilibrium flows or conditions where one transition into the other, as a function of time and/or space. Numerically, such flows could be described with a purely kinetic method which, in the limit of small particle mean free paths, reproduces a continuum regime. However, from a computational perspective, such approaches are usually very expensive or simply not feasible, even on modern computational architectures. A solution is the construction of hybrid methods which connect the kinetic and hydrodynamic system of evolution equations. Such coupling usually requires specific boundary conditions between non-equilibrium and continuum regimes which come with their own numerical challenges and can introduce unphysical effects. Here, we present a hybrid model which uses a buffer region to transition from a kinetic into a fluid description following the original work of Degond et al. [1]. In the buffer region, both, the kinetic and hydrodynamic equations are solved simultaneously while being coupled via a so-called transition function. The latter also ensures a smooth conversion from the coupled model to either the kinetic or continuum approach at the interfaces of the buffer region. With that, the method avoids the need to find direct interface boundary conditions and allows one to localize the use of a high dimensional kinetic model only where it is needed. In our work, we extend the original method of Degond to flows with multiple particle species in 3D. We derive the coupled equations for the multispecies Vlasov-Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (VBGK) model and its limiting Euler or Navier-Stokes hydrodynamic equations. To validate our model numerically, we simulate a Sod shock problem and study the effect of kinetic multi-species mixing in the preheat phase of a high energy-density plasma physics experiment.