A bi-fidelity method for the multiscale Boltzmann equation with random parameters

Abstract: In this paper, we study the multiscale Boltzmann equation with multi-dimensional random parameters by a bi-fidelity stochastic collocation (SC) method developed in [A. Narayan, C. Gittelson and D. Xiu, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 36 (2014); X. Zhu, A. Narayan and D. Xiu, SIAM J. Uncertain. Quantif., 2 (2014)]. By choosing the compressible Euler system as the low-fidelity model, we adapt the bi-fidelity SC method to combine computational efficiency of the low-fidelity model with high accuracy of the high-fidelity (Boltzmann) model. With only a small number of high-fidelity asymptotic-preserving solver runs for the Boltzmann equation, the bi-fidelity approximation can capture well the macroscopic quantities of the solution to the Boltzmann equation in the random space. A priori estimate on the accuracy between the high- and bi-fidelity solutions together with a convergence analysis is established. Finally, we present extensive numerical experiments to verify the efficiency and accuracy of our proposed method.