Gas-kinetic Scheme Research Articles

Reduced order modeling-based discrete unified gas kinetic scheme for rarefied gas flows

Boltzmann solvers face significant difficulty in simulating rarefied flows at high Knudsen numbers. In this flow regime, the gas distribution function is widely scattered and highly concentrated with a very steep slope in the particle velocity space. In order to capture the feature of such a flow, the Boltzmann solvers such as the Discrete Unified Gas Kinetic Scheme (DUGKS) discretize the particle velocity space with a very fine mesh (many discrete particle velocities) using the Discrete Velocity Method (DVM) due to which the load for computation becomes unendurable. In this paper, a Reduced Order Modeling (ROM) method is used to generate a reduced discrete velocity space for the DUGKS. More specifically, the discrete empirical interpolation method [S. Chaturantabut and D. C. Sorensen, SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 32, 2737–2764 (2010)] is used to select the dominant nodes in the original discrete velocity space to form a reduced discrete velocity space, which represents important dynamical characteristics. In this way, most grid points in the discrete velocity space, which are of negligible importance on the integration, are removed in practical computation, which yields a significant improvement in computational efficiency. The proposed ROM approach is not limited to a specific DVM-based solver. For illustration, in this paper, we developed the Reduced Order Modeling-based Discrete Unified Gas Kinetic Scheme (ROM-DUGKS) by applying the reduced velocity space to the conventional DUGKS. Validations are performed in both low-speed and hypersonic rarefied flows at various Knudsen numbers. The results show that the ROM-DUGKS is much more efficient than the original DUGKS while still maintaining high accuracy. This significant improvement in computational efficiency will unleash the potential of the DVM-based solvers such as the DUGKS for practical applications to rarefied flow problems.

Discrete unified gas kinetic scheme for a reformulated BGK–Vlasov–Poisson system in all electrostatic plasma regimes

In this paper, the discrete unified gas kinetic scheme (DUGKS), which is a novel direct kinetic method, is developed for a reformulated BGK–Vlasov–Poisson system in all electrostatic plasma regimes characterized by a wide range of Knudsen number and normalized Debye length. The current scheme is constructed for multiscale plasma simulation, while the temporal and spatial step sizes of the method are not restricted by the Knudsen number and normalized Debye length. One key feature of this method is the un-splitting treatment of the particle transport, collision and acceleration in both the distribution function evolution and the numerical flux evaluation, which enables the method to economically and accurately provide a satisfactory solution for all Knudsen number regimes. With the coupling of the appropriate time discretization of the distribution function and a reformulated Poisson equation, the method further provides an easy-to-implement and efficient way for the investigation of electrical potential in all normalized Debye regimes. As a result, the proposed DUGKS becomes an asymptotic preserving scheme, which automatically degenerates to be consistent with the discretization of corresponding limiting models. Several numerical experiments in different electrostatic plasma regimes are presented to validate the proposed method.

Simulation of Fire with a Gas Kinetic Scheme on Distributed GPGPU Architectures

The simulation of fire is a challenging task due to its occurrence on multiple space-time scales and the non-linear interaction of multiple physical processes. Current state-of-the-art software such as the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) implements most of the required physics, yet a significant drawback of this implementation is its limited scalability on modern massively parallel hardware. The current paper presents a massively parallel implementation of a Gas Kinetic Scheme (GKS) on General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) as a potential alternative modeling and simulation approach. The implementation is validated for turbulent natural convection against experimental data. Subsequently, it is validated for two simulations of fire plumes, including a small-scale table top setup and a fire on the scale of a few meters. We show that the present GKS achieves comparable accuracy to the results obtained by FDS. Yet, due to the parallel efficiency on dedicated hardware, our GKS implementation delivers a reduction of wall-clock times of more than an order of magnitude. This paper demonstrates the potential of explicit local schemes in massively parallel environments for the simulation of fire.

A three-dimensional gas-kinetic flux solver for simulation of viscous flows with explicit formulations of conservative variables and numerical flux

A truly three-dimensional (3D) gas-kinetic flux solver for simulation of incompressible and compressible viscous flows is presented in this work. By local reconstruction of continuous Boltzmann equation, the inviscid and viscous fluxes across the cell interface are evaluated simultaneously in the solver. Different from conventional gas-kinetic scheme, in the present work, the distribution function at cell interface is computed in a straightforward way. As an extension of our previous work (Sun et al., Journal of Computational Physics, 300 (2015) 492–519), the non-equilibrium distribution function is calculated by the difference of equilibrium distribution functions between the cell interface and its surrounding points. As a result, the distribution function at cell interface can be simply calculated and the formulations for computing the conservative flow variables and fluxes can be given explicitly. To validate the proposed flux solver, several incompressible and compressible viscous flows are simulated. Numerical results show that the current scheme can provide accurate numerical results for three-dimensional incompressible and compressible viscous flows.

A velocity-space adaptive unified gas kinetic scheme for continuum and rarefied flows

Compressible flow has intrinsically multiple scale nature due to the large variations of gas density and characteristic scale of flow structure, especially in hypersonic and reentry problems. It is challenging to construct an accurate and efficient numerical algorithm to capture non-equilibrium flow physics across different regimes. In this paper, a unified gas kinetic scheme with adaptive velocity space (AUGKS) for multiscale flow transport will be developed. In near-equilibrium flow region, particle distribution function is close to the Chapman-Enskog expansion and can be formulated analytically, where only macroscopic conservative flow variables are updated. With the emergence of non-equilibrium effect, the AUGKS automatically switches to the original unified gas kinetic scheme (UGKS) with a discrete velocity space to follow the evolution of particle distribution function. A criterion is proposed to quantify the non-equilibrium and is used for the switch between continuous and discrete particle velocity space. Following the scale-dependent local evolving solution, the AUGKS presents the discretized gas dynamic equations directly on the cell size and time step scales, i.e., the so-called direct modeling method. As a result, the scheme is able to capture the cross-scale flow physics from particle transport to hydrodynamic wave propagation, and provides a continuous variation of solutions from the Boltzmann to the Euler equations. Different from conventional DSMC-Fluid hybrid method, the AUGKS does not need a buffer zone to match up kinetic and hydrodynamic solutions. Instead, continuous and discrete particle velocity spaces are automatically and robustly switched, such as translating the continuous Chapman-Enskog distribution function to the discrete grid points in the velocity space. Therefore, the AUGKS is feasible for the numerical simulations with unsteadiness and complex geometries. Compared with the asymptotic preserving (AP) method which solves kinetic equation uniformly over entire computational domain with discretized velocity space, the current velocity-space adaptive unified scheme speeds up the computation, reduces the memory requirement significantly, and maintains the equivalent accuracy for multiscale flow simulations. Many test cases validate the current approach. The AUGKS provides an effective tool for non-equilibrium flow studies.

High-order ALE gas-kinetic scheme with WENO reconstruction

In this paper, a high-order multi-dimensional gas-kinetic scheme is presented for both inviscid and viscous flows in arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) formulation. Compared with the traditional ALE method, the flow variables are updated in the finite volume framework, and the rezoning and remapping steps are not required. The two-stage fourth-order method is used for the temporal discretization, and the second-order gas-kinetic solver is applied for the flux evaluation. In the two-stage method, the spatial reconstruction is performed at the initial and intermediate stages, and the computational meshes are determined by the mesh velocity. In the moving mesh procedure, the mesh may distort severely and the mesh quality is reduced. To achieve the accuracy and improve the robustness, the newly developed WENO method [40] on quadrilateral meshes is adopted at each stage. The Gaussian quadrature is used for flux calculation. For each Gaussian point, the WENO reconstruction is performed in local moving coordinate, where the variation of mesh velocity along cell interface is taken into account. Numerical examples are presented to validate the performance of current scheme, where the mesh adaptation method and the cell centered Lagrangian method are used to provide mesh velocities.

A modified gas kinetic scheme for collisional SRS model with relativistic effect

A modified gas kinetic scheme (MGKS) for collisional laser-plasma interaction model is proposed in this paper. Splitting method is applied for the kinetic and electromagnetic parts, to describe the behavior of relativistic electrons in phase space, modification is considered in the reconstruction of equilibrium and transport process, a higher order reconstruction method is designed on the flux reconstruction to reduce the energy error, and accurate Fourier interpolation is applied to Maxwell equation. Numerical experiments are tested by the stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) problems, including forward and backward Raman scattering, which show this scheme can give satisfied results.

An efficient high-order gas-kinetic scheme (I): Euler equations

In this paper, an efficient high-order gas-kinetic scheme (EHGKS) is proposed to solve the Euler equations for compressible flows. We re-investigate the underlying mechanism of the high-order gas-kinetic scheme (HGKS) and find a new strategy to improve its efficiency. The main idea of the new scheme contains two parts. Firstly, inspired by the state-of-art simplifications on the third-order HGKS, we extend the HGKS to the case of arbitrary high-order accuracy and eliminate its unnecessary high-order dissipation terms. Secondly, instead of computing the derivatives of particle distribution function and their complex moments, we introduce a Lax-Wendroff procedure to compute the high-order derivatives of macroscopic quantities directly. The new scheme takes advantage of both HGKS and the Lax-Wendroff procedure, so that it can be easily extended to the case of arbitrary high-order accuracy with practical significance. Typical numerical tests are carried out by EHGKS, with the third, fifth and seventh order of accuracy. The presence of good resolution of the discontinuities and flow details, together with the optimal CFL numbers, validates the high accuracy and strong robustness of EHGKS. To compare the efficiency, we present the results computed by the EHGKS, the original HGKS and Runge-Kutta-WENO-GKS. This further demonstrates the advantages of EHGKS.

Discrete unified gas kinetic scheme for electrostatic plasma and its comparison with the particle-in-cell method.

In this paper, we present a finite-volume direct kinetic method, the so-called discrete unified gas kinetic scheme (DUGKS), for electrostatic plasma. One key feature of this method is the semi-implicit unsplitting treatment of particle transport and collision, and thus the time step in current DUGKS is not limited by the particle collision time. In addition, a fourth-order compact MUSCL scheme with a positivity preserving limiter is implemented in the interface reconstruction, which enables present DUGKS to preserve the favorable conservative property and positivity of distribution function. Combined with this MUSCL method, the semi-Lagrangian scheme is used for the particle transport in velocity space to remove Courant-Friedricks-Lewy restriction induced by the large electric force. As a result, the proposed DUGKS becomes an efficient and stable multiscale scheme. Several numerical experiments, including plasma sheath, linear Landau damping, collisional nonlinear Landau damping, and plasma ion acceleration, are performed to validate current DUGKS. A comparative study of current DUGKS with a general particle in cell (PIC) method which could handle particle collision in a conservative way is also presented. Theory and numerical experiments demonstrate that DUGKS is preferred for plasma flows involving small electrostatic perturbation and high collision regimes, while the PIC method is desired for the field- dominated plasma flows involving a wide range of velocities.

A generalized sphere function-based gas kinetic scheme for simulation of compressible viscous flows

In this paper, a generalized sphere function-based gas kinetic scheme (GKS) is developed for simulation of two-dimensional compressible viscous flows. This work aims to improve the existing simplified GKS, in which a simple two-dimensional/three-dimensional distribution function is used as the equilibrium state. The present scheme applies the finite volume method to discretize Navier–Stokes equations and the numerical flux at cell interface is evaluated by the local reconstruction of solution for the continuous Boltzmann equation with [Formula: see text]-dimensional sphere function. This local solution contains both the equilibrium part and nonequilibrium part, and the contribution of the nonequilibrium part is controlled by a switch function. It is found that the present scheme has the same expression as the circular function-based GKS for the two-dimensional case and the sphere function-based GKS for the three-dimensional case. Therefore, these two GKSs can be unified, and the developed method provides another way for the simple distribution function.

Discrete unified gas kinetic scheme for all Knudsen number flows. IV. Strongly inhomogeneous fluids.

This work is an extension of the discrete unified gas kinetic scheme (DUGKS) from rarefied gas dynamics to strongly inhomogeneous dense fluid systems. The fluid molecular size can be ignored for dilute gases, while the nonlocal intermolecular collisions and the competition of solid-fluid and fluid-fluid interactions play an important role for surface-confined fluid flows at the nanometer scale. The nonequilibrium state induces strong fluid structural-confined inhomogeneity and anomalous fluid flow dynamics. According to the previous kinetic model [Guo etal., Phys. Rev. E 71, 035301(R) (2005)10.1103/PhysRevE.71.035301], the long-range intermolecular attraction is modeled by the mean-field approximation, and the volume exclusion effect is considered by the hard-sphere potential in the collision operator. The kinetic model is solved by the DUGKS, which has the characteristics of asymptotic preserving, low dissipation, second-order accuracy, and multidimensional nature. Both static fluid structure and dynamic flow behaviors are calculated and validated with Monte Carlo or molecular dynamics results. It is shown that the flow of dense fluid systems tends to that of rarefied gases as the dense degree decreases or the mean flow path increases. The DUGKS is proved to be applicable to simulate such nonequilibrium dense fluid systems.

Double distribution function-based discrete gas kinetic scheme for viscous incompressible and compressible flows

In this work, we propose a flux solver that relies on a double distribution function (DDF) based discrete gas-kinetic scheme (DGKS) for incompressible and compressible viscous flows. By decomposing the phase space of the Maxwellian distribution function, the double distribution function (DDF) model is established to remove the phase energy variables and develop more compact formulations. It utilizes the density distribution function to recover the macroscopic mass and momentum conservations, and the energy distribution function to derive the macroscopic energy equation. Associated with a modified collision operator for the energy distribution function, the Prandtl number in the recovered energy equation becomes adjustable. The DDF model can be further simplified with the idea of the improved circular function and by replacing the continuous integration with the quadrature algorithm, which yields the discrete DDF model. This model can then be adopted in the reconstruction of numerical fluxes on the cell interface within the framework of the finite volume method, and the improved discrete gas-kinetic scheme (DGKS) is established. In contrast to the previous DGKS [39], the improved flux solver recovers the correct macroscopic equations and allows free adjustment of the Prandtl number. Besides, the introduction of the energy distribution function abbreviates the expression of the energy flux and thus makes the final formulations more compact. Numerical tests, including the compressible Couette flow, lid-driven cavity flow, transonic flow around the airfoil, shock-boundary layer interaction and supersonic flow around a ramp segment, are presented to validate the proposed flux solver in various flow conditions and compare its performance with the previous DGKS methods [39,43].

A HWENO reconstruction based high-order compact gas-kinetic scheme on unstructured mesh

As an extension of a fourth-order compact gas kinetic scheme (GKS) on structured mesh [24], this work is about the development of a third-order compact GKS on unstructured mesh for the compressible Euler and Navier-Stokes solutions. Based on the time accurate high-order gas-kinetic evolution solution, the time-dependent gas distribution function at a cell interface in GKS provides not only the flux function and its time derivative, but also the time accurate flow variables there at the next time level. As a result, besides updating the conservative flow variables inside each control volume through the interface fluxes, the cell averaged first-order spatial derivatives of flow variables can be obtained as well using the updated flow variables at the closed cell interfaces around that cell through the divergence theorem. Therefore, with the cell-averaged flow variables and their first-order spatial derivatives inside each cell, the Hermite WENO (HWENO) techniques can be naturally implemented for the compact high-order reconstruction at the beginning of the next time step. Following the reconstruction technique in [64], a new HWENO reconstruction on triangular mesh is designed in the current scheme. Combined with the two-stage temporal discretization and second-order time accurate flux function, a third-order compact scheme on unstructured mesh has been constructed. Accurate solutions can be obtained for both inviscid and viscous flows without sensitive dependence on the quality of triangular mesh. The robustness and accuracy of the scheme have been validated through many cases, including strong shocks in the hypersonic viscous flow and smooth Navier-Stokes solution.

Evolution of Flow and Streaming in Exponential Variable Cross-Section Resonators

A gas-kinetic scheme (GKS) based on an unstructured grid is applied to simulate the evolution of the fluid motions in exponential variable cross-section resonators. The effects of the acoustic field intensity on the oscillatory pressure, velocity, temperature, and flow streaming structure were investigated numerically, and the model was validated. The results demonstrate that the geometry and driving strength are the main factors affecting the final performance of the system. For the quasi-linear and moderate non-linear cases in optimum exponential tube, the periodic generation, evolution, and shedding of vortices in flow fields are associated with the storage and release of energy, which is the transmission mode of the third type of direct current (DC) flow, and its driving mechanism is attributed to the asymmetrical pressure and temperature. Meanwhile, some new physical characteristics were also discovered for the highly non-linear case, e.g., the disorder and unsteadiness of the flow direction accomplished with turbulent flow streaming structures. The secondary flow is manifested as multiscale, irregular and unsteady vortices throughout the tube. The smallest increment of pressure and velocity amplitude occurs concurrently with the biggest increment of temperature amplitude. These evidences suggest that there is an optimal driving strength, even for a good configuration tube, with which the maximum efficiency can be obtained.

Analysis and assessment of the no-slip and slip boundary conditions for the discrete unified gas kinetic scheme.

The discrete unified gas kinetic scheme (DUGKS) with a force term is a finite volume solver for the Boltzmann equation. Unlike the standard lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), DUGKS can be applied on nonuniform grids. For both the LBM and DUGKS, the boundary conditions need to be processed through the density distribution function. So researchers introduced the boundary conditions from the LBM frame into the DUGKS. However, the accuracy of these boundary conditions in the DUGKS has not been studied thoroughly. Through strict theoretical deduction, we find that the bounce-back (BB) scheme leads to a different dependence of the numerical error term in the DUGKS as compared to the LBM. The error term is influenced by the relaxation time and the body force. And it can be reduced by lowering the kinetic viscosity. Unlike the BB scheme, the nonequilibrium bounce-back scheme has the ability to implement real no-slip boundary condition. Furthermore, two slip boundary conditions incorporated with Navier's slip model are introduced from the LBM framework into the DUGKS. The tangential momentum change-based (TMAC) scheme can be used directly in the DUGKS because it generates no numerical error term in the DUGKS. For the combination of the bounce-back and specular reflection schemes (BSR), the relation between the slip length and the combination parameter should be modified in accordance with the numerical error term. Analysis shows that the TMAC scheme can simulate a wider range of slip length than the BSR scheme. Numerical simulations of the Couette flow and the Poiseuille flow confirm our theoretical analysis.

Discrete unified gas kinetic scheme for nonlinear convection-diffusion equations.

In this paper, we develop a discrete unified gas kinetic scheme (DUGKS) for a general nonlinear convection-diffusion equation (NCDE) and show that the NCDE can be recovered correctly from the present model through the Chapman-Enskog analysis. We then test the present DUGKS through some classic convection-diffusion equations, and we find that the numerical results are in good agreement with analytical solutions and that the DUGKS model has a second-order convergence rate. Finally, as a finite-volume method, the DUGKS can also adopt the nonuniform mesh. Besides, we perform some comparisons among the DUGKS, the finite-volume lattice Boltzmann model (FV-LBM), the single-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann model (SLBM), and the multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann model (MRT-LBM). The results show that the present DUGKS is more accurate than the FV-LBM, more stable than the SLBM, and almost has the same accuracy as the MRT-LBM. Moreover, the use of nonuniform mesh may make the DUGKS model more flexible.

Fluid-thermal modeling of hypersonic vehicles via a gas-kinetic BGK scheme-based integrated algorithm

In our previous paper (doi: 10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2019.119016), the gas-kinetic BGK scheme was used to simulate both hypersonic flow and structural heat transfer, between which loose coupling was adopted for solving two-dimensional fluid-thermal problems. To model the unitive and continuous fluid-thermal processes more actually, this paper presents a BGK scheme-based integrated algorithm and the research object is extended to three-dimensional hypersonic vehicles. To start with, an appropriate BGK model is constructed for the unified macroscopic governing equations, the effectiveness of which is verified by the Chapman-Enskog expansion analysis. Then following similar procedures in the original scheme, the gas distribution function at each cell interface is derived, from which the numerical fluxes can be evaluated. The dual-time stepping approach, together with an implicit JFNK–BGK method, is applied to efficiently obtain time-accurate solutions. With an effective parallelization strategy that is in line with the integrated algorithm, the computational efficiency is improved. As another aspect which distinguishes from the loosely-coupled methods, the fluid-structure interface conditions are also addressed. For validation, several test cases are investigated, including an individual hypersonic flow, an individual transient heat transfer, and two fluid-thermal problems. By comparison with other methods and analysis of the computed results, features of the developed method are demonstrated.

Unified gas-kinetic wave-particle methods III: Multiscale photon transport

In this paper, we extend the unified gas-kinetic wave-particle (UGKWP) method to multiscale photon transport. In this method, the photon free streaming and scattering processes are treated in an un-splitting way. The photon distribution is described by both discrete simulation particle and analytic distribution function. By accurately recovering the multiscale modeling of the unified gas-kinetic scheme (UGKS), the UGKWP method presents a smooth transition for photon transport from optically thin to optically thick regimes according to the cell's Knudsen number. In the optically thin regime, the UGKWP method performs as a Monte Carlo type particle tracking method, while in the optically thick regime it recovers a diffusion process without particles. The proportion of wave-described and particle-described photons is automatically adapted according to the numerical resolution and local photon scattering physics, i.e., the so-called cell Knudsen number. Compared to the discrete ordinates-based UGKS, the UGKWP method requires less memory and does not suffer from ray effect. Compared to the implicit Monte Carlo (IMC) method, the statistical noise of the UGKWP method is greatly reduced, and the computational efficiency is significantly improved in the optically thick regime. Several numerical examples covering all transport regimes from the optically thin to optically thick ones are computed to validate the accuracy and efficiency of the UGKWP method. In comparison with the UGKS and IMC method, the UGKWP method may have a several-order-of-magnitude reduction in computational cost and memory requirement in solving some multiscale transport problems.

Discrete unified gas kinetic scheme for multiscale anisotropic radiative heat transfer

In this work, a discrete unified gas kinetic scheme (DUGKS) is developed for radiative transfer in anisotropic scattering media. The method is an extension of a previous one for isotropic radiation problems [1]. The present scheme is a finite-volume discretization of the anisotropic gray radiation equation, where the anisotropic scattering phase function is approximated by the Legendre polynomial expansion. With the coupling of free transport and scattering processes in the reconstruction of the flux at cell interfaces, the present DUGKS has the nice unified preserving properties such that the cell size is not limited by the photon mean free path even in the optical thick regime. Several one- and two-dimensional numerical tests are conducted to validate the performance of the present DUGKS, and the numerical results demonstrate that the scheme is a reliable method for anisotropic radiative heat transfer problems.

Can we find steady-state solutions to multiscale rarefied gas flows within dozens of iterations?

One of the central problems in the study of rarefied gas dynamics is to find the steady-state solution of the Boltzmann equation quickly. When the Knudsen number is large, i.e. the system is highly rarefied, the conventional iterative scheme can lead to convergence within a few iterations. However, when the Knudsen number is small, i.e. the flow falls in the near-continuum regime, hundreds of thousands iterations are needed, and yet the “converged” solutions are prone to be contaminated by accumulated error and large numerical dissipation. Recently, based on the gas kinetic models, the implicit unified gas kinetic scheme (UGKS) and its variants have significantly reduced the number of iterations in the near-continuum flow regime, but still much higher than that of the highly rarefied gas flows. In this paper, we put forward a general synthetic iterative scheme (GSIS) to find the steady-state solutions of rarefied gas flows within dozens of iterations at any Knudsen number. The key ingredient of our scheme is that the macroscopic equations, which are solved together with the Boltzmann equation and help to adjust the velocity distribution function, not only asymptotically preserve the Navier-Stokes limit in the framework of Chapman-Enskog expansion, but also contain the Newton's law for stress and the Fourier's law for heat conduction explicitly. For this reason, like the implicit UGKS, the constraint that the spatial cell size should be smaller than the mean free path of gas molecules is removed, but we do not need the complex evaluation of numerical flux at cell interfaces. What's more, as the GSIS does not rely on the specific collision operator, it can be naturally extended to quickly find converged solutions for mixture flows and even flows involving chemical reactions. These two superior advantages are expected to accelerate the slow convergence in the simulation of near-continuum flows via the direct simulation Monte Carlo method and its low-variance version.