An implicit kinetic inviscid flux for predicting continuum flows in all speed regimes

Abstract

In this study, the kinetic inviscid flux (KIF) is improved and an implicit strategy is coupled. The recently proposed KIF is a kind of inviscid flux, whose microscopic mechanism makes it good at solving shock waves, with advantages against the shock instability phenomenon. When developing the implicit KIF, a phenomenon is noticed that the kinetic flux vector splitting (KFVS) part in boundary layers not only reduces the accuracy, but seriously reduces the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) number as well. As a result, in this paper, a new weight is proposed about how to combine the KFVS method well with the totally thermalized transport (TTT) method. Besides admitting the using of larger CFL numbers, this new weight brings about more accurate numerical results like pressure, friction coefficient and heat flux when solving shock waves, boundary layers and complex supersonic/hypersonic flows. In order to examine the validity, accuracy and efficiency of the present method, six numerical test cases, covering the whole speed regime, are conducted, including the hypersonic viscous flow past a cylinder, the hypersonic double-cone flow, the hypersonic double-ellipsoid flow, the laminar shock boundary layer interaction, the supersonic flow around a ramp segment and the lid-driven cavity flow. The advantages of this scheme and corresponding mechanisms are to be discussed in detail.