Compact Higher-order Gas-kinetic Schemes with Spectral-like Resolution for Compressible Flow Simulations

Abstract: In this paper, a class of compact higher-order gas-kinetic schemes (GKS) with spectral resolution will be presented. Based on the high-order gas evolution model in GKS, both the interface flux function and conservative flow variables can be evaluated explicitly from the time-accurate gas distribution function. As a result, inside each control volume both the cell-averaged flow variables and their cell-averaged gradients can be updated within each time step. The flow variable update and slope update are coming from the same physical solution at the cell interface. Different from many other approaches, such as HWENO, there are no additional governing equations in GKS for the slopes or equivalent degrees of freedom independently inside each cell. For nonlinear gas dynamic evolution, the above compact linear reconstruction from the symmetric stencil can be divided into sub-stencils and apply a biased nonlinear WENO-Z reconstruction. In GKS, the time evolution solution of the gas distribution function at a cell interface covers a physical process from an initial non-equilibrium state to a final equilibrium one. The GKS evolution models unifies the nonlinear and linear reconstructions in gas evolution process for the determination of a time-dependent gas distribution function. This dynamically adaptive model helps to solve a long lasting problem in the development of high-order schemes about the choices of the linear and nonlinear reconstructions. Compared with discontinuous Galerkin (DG) scheme, the current compact GKS uses the same local and compact stencil, achieves the 6th-order and 8th-order accuracy, uses a much larger time step with CFL number $\geq 0.3$, and gets accurate solutions in both shock and smooth regions without introducing trouble cell and additional limiting process. At the same time, the current scheme solves the Navier-Stokes equations.