On the multidimensional gas-kinetic BGK scheme (Q860324)

The paper is devoted to the performance difference among the multidimensional (MD) gas-kinetic BGK scheme, the corresponding quasi-one-dimensional (Q1D) extension and the directional splitting (DS) scheme with kinetic boundary conditions. The authors construct the MD BGK scheme with scalar transport in the smooth flow region with the inclusion of the tangential slopes in flux computation, which are absent in a Q1D or DS version. It is shown that the MD scheme can capture the inverted velocity profile in a rarefied cylindrical Couette flow, and the weak flow field induced by a nonuniform wall temperature with low Knudson number, while the Q1D fails. In high-speed microchannel flow and power-law fluid flow between rotating cylinders, the MD scheme can also yield clearly better results than the Q1D method. In the low-Reynolds-number flow around NACA0012 airfoil, the MD and Q1D predicted wall heat flux distribution with difference. The DS method predicted results nearly identical to those from Q1D in these steady flow cases, except that it is not able to give reasonable solutions in non-Newtonian fluid case with viscous exponential factor away from unity. In simulations of the scalar convection-diffusion equation, it is found that the inclusion of tangential slopes in the flux computation can clearly improve the temporal accuracy of the scheme. So, the paper suggests caution in adopting of the Q1D extension or DS method in multidimensional flows when it is sensitive to the accuracy of stress or wall variable gradient calculations.