A unified gas kinetic scheme with moving mesh and velocity space adaptation

There is great difficulty for direct Boltzmann solvers to simulate high Knudsen number flow due to the severe steep slope and high concentration of the gas distribution function in a local particle velocity space. Local mesh adaptation becomes necessary in order to make the Boltzmann solver to be a practical tool in aerospace applications. The present research improves the unified gas-kinetic scheme (UGKS) in the following two aspects. First, the UGKS is extended in a physical space with moving mesh. This technique is important to study a freely flying object in a rarefied environment. Second, the adaptive quadtree method in the particle velocity space is implemented in the UGKS. Due to the new improvements in the discretization of a gas distribution function in the six dimensional phase space, the adaptive unified gas kinetic scheme (AUGKS) is able to deal with a wide range of flow problems under extreme flying conditions, such as the whole unsteady flying process of an object from a highly rarefied to a continuum flow regime. After validating the scheme, the capability of AUGKS is demonstrated in the following two challenge test cases. The first case is about the free movement of an ellipse flying at initial Mach number 5 in a rarefied flow at different Knudsen numbers. The force on the ellipse and the unsteady trajectory of the ellipse movement are fully captured. The gas distribution function around the ellipse is analyzed. The second case is about the study of unsteady flight of a nozzle under a bursting process of the compressed gas expanding into a rarefied environment. Due to the strong expansion wave and the huge density difference between interior and exterior regions around the nozzle, the particle distribution function changes dramatically in the particle velocity space. The use of an adaptive velocity space in the AUGKS becomes necessary to simulate such a flow and to control the computational cost to a tolerable level. The second test is a challenge problem for any existing rarefied flow solver. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.