Unified stochastic particle simulation of polyatomic gas flows using SPARTACUS

Abstract

Numerically simulating multiscale nonequilibrium gas flows that involve internal energy exchange is a challenging problem in engineering applications due to the complexity of the physical processes. The unified stochastic particle (USP) method, based on the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) model, is a promising approach for efficiently simulating multiscale flows. In this paper, we develop a USP method for polyatomic gases that can simulate hypersonic gas flows involving internal energy exchange across all flow regimes. This method is integrated into the open-source SPARTACUS solver, which was previously developed for monatomic gases. The newly developed USP method reassigns the velocity and internal energies of a subset of computational particles based on a precisely designed local target distribution function. A conservation algorithm is applied to ensure that the momentum and energy are conserved. To validate the accuracy and efficiency of the solver, we perform three benchmark cases, including flow past a two-dimensional cylinder, a three-dimensional 70° blunted cone, and an axisymmetric double cone configuration. The results demonstrate that SPARTACUS achieves excellent agreement with the reference results of DSMC and experimental data. Additionally, SPARTACUS provides significant computational efficiency advantages over the DSMC solver SPARTA, particularly in simulating three-dimensional gas flows.