Convergence estimates of a semi-Lagrangian scheme for the ellipsoidal BGK model for polyatomic molecules

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new semi-Lagrangian scheme for the polyatomic ellipsoidal BGK model. In order to avoid time step restrictions coming from convection term and small Knudsen number, we combine a semi-Lagrangian approach for the convection term with an implicit treatment for the relaxation term. We show how to explicitly solve the implicit step, thus obtaining an efficient and stable scheme for any Knudsen number. We also derive an explicit error estimate on the convergence of the proposed scheme for every fixed value of the Knudsen number.