A two stage fourth-order gas-kinetic scheme on unstructured hybrid mesh

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-order, two-stage gas-kinetic scheme on unstructured hybrid meshes that improves accuracy and efficiency for simulating viscous flows, including shock capturing and complex flow phenomena.

Contribution

It develops a fourth-order gas-kinetic scheme with a novel two-stage time stepping method and cubic spline reconstruction, enhancing accuracy and reducing complexity over traditional methods.

Findings

Successfully applied to various flow problems demonstrating high accuracy.

Effective shock capturing with WENO blending.

Reduced computational complexity compared to Runge-Kutta methods.

Abstract

This paper presents an accurate and robust fourth order gas-kinetic scheme on two dimensional unstructured hybrid mesh for incompressible and compressible viscous flows. For generalized Riemann problem and Navier-Stokes solution, the gas-kinetic scheme (GKS) provides a time-accurate flux solver using a different way in the reconstruction at a cell interface in which two slopes for the equilibrium state are used. Different from the previous one-stage time-stepping method, the two-stage Lax-Wendroff type time stepping method is applied in this paper. Compared to standard four-stage fourth-order Runge-Kutta method, the two-stage fourth order time accurate method reduces the complexity of the adoption of time derivative of the flux function. To achieve fourth order accuracy, a finite volume method for GKS using cubic spline reconstruction is proposed on both structured grid and unstructured hybrid mesh. When dealing with flow discontinuities, the original spline scheme is replaced by the one blended with shock-capturing WENO scheme. Many one and two-dimensional test cases, including Couette flow, Shu-Osher problem, Woodward-Colella blast problem, two-dimensional Riemann problem, viscous shock tube flow, supersonic flow over a forward-facing step, and hypersonic flow over a circular cylinder, are carried out to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme.