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

In this paper, a unified gas kinetic scheme with adaptive velocity space (AUGKS) for multiscale flow transport will be developed. In near-equilibrium flow regions, particle distribution function is close to the Chapman-Enskog expansion and can be formulated with a continuous velocity space, where only macroscopic conservative variables are updated. With the emerging of non-equilibrium effects, the AUGKS automatically switches to a discrete velocity space to follow the evolution of particle distribution function. Based on the Chapman-Enskog expansion, a criterion is proposed in this paper to quantify the intensity of non-equilibrium effects and is used for the continuous-discrete velocity space transformation. Following the scale-dependent local evolution 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 Navier-Stokes. Under the unified framework, different from conventional DSMC-NS hybrid method, the AUGKS does not need a buffer zone to match up kinetic and hydrodynamic solutions. Instead, a continuous and discrete particle velocity space is naturally connected, which is feasible for the numerical simulations with unsteadiness or complex geometries. Compared with the asymptotic preserving (AP) methods which solves kinetic equations uniformly over the entire flow field with discretized velocity space, the current velocity-space adaptive unified scheme speeds up the computation and reduces the memory requirement in multiscale flow problems, and maintains the equivalent accuracy. The AUGKS provides an effective tool for non-equilibrium flow simulations.