A class of asymptotic-preserving schemes for kinetic equations and related problems with stiff sources (Q2638274)

The authors propose a new general time-discrete framework to design asymptotic-preserving schemes for the initial value problem of the Boltzmann kinetic equation. This equation describes the time evolution of the density distribution of a dilute gas of particles when the interactions taken into account are binary elastic collisions represented by the Boltzmann quadratic collision operator \({\mathcal Q}\). The so far done progress on developing robust numerical schemes for kinetic equations has been performed in the framework of an asymptotic-preserving (AP) scheme, i.e., it preserves the discrete analogy of the Chapman-Enskog expansion (it is a suitable scheme for a kinetic equation when holding the mesh size and time step fixed letting the Knudsen number go to zero) and collision terms can be implemented explicitly. AP schemes avoid the coupling of physical equations of different scales where the coupling conditions are difficult to obtain and interface locations are hard to determine. They are based on solving one kinetic equation and can be used in many different situations, however sometimes for AP approach it is hard to fulfill a condition in which \(f^n-{\mathcal M}^n={\mathcal O}(\varepsilon)\), where \(f\) stands for initial data, \({\mathcal M}\) is the Maxwellian distribution and \(\varepsilon\rightarrow 0\). If the mentioned above \({\mathcal Q}\) collision operator is a BGK operator, i.e., \({\mathcal Q}_{\text{BGK}}={\mathcal M}-f\), then it is possible to obtain an explicit solution for the problem. The authors propose to use the new \({\mathcal Q}\) operator given by \({\mathcal Q}=[{\mathcal Q}-\lambda({\mathcal M}-f)]+ \lambda{\mathcal M}-f]\), where \(\lambda\) is a spectral radius of the linearized collision operator \({\mathcal Q}\) around the local Maxwellian \({\mathcal M}\). This approach was partially motivated by Haack et al. and it can be used not only for the Boltzmann equation but also for nonlinear hyperbolic systems with stiff nonlinear relaxation terms. The paper consists of 7 sections. In the second section we have the presentation of the proposed method for stiff ordinary equations with considerations about the simple linear problem as the example solved numerically. In the third section the method is studied for hyperbolic system with (stiff) relaxations -- another numerical example is given. Section 4 shows the extension of the method to the Boltzmann equation with mathematical considerations while in Section 5 we have the numerical tests for approaches presented in previous section. The sixth section illustrates the efficiency of the asymptotic preserving scheme for high order differential operators -- the Willmore flow is the example. The paper is concluded in section 7.