Currently the Boltzmann equation and its model equations are widely used in numerical predictions for dilute gas flows. The nonlinear integro-differential Boltzmann equation is the fundamental equation in the kinetic theory of dilute monatomic gases. By replacing the nonlinear fivefold collision integral term by a nonlinear relaxation term, its model equations such as the famous Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) equation are mathematically simple. Since the computational cost of solving model equations is much less than that of solving the full Boltzmann equation, the model equations are widely used in predicting rarefied flows, multiphase flows, chemical flows, and turbulent flows although their predictions are only qualitatively right for highly nonequilibrium flows in transitional regime. In this paper the differences between the Boltzmann equation and its model equations are investigated aiming at giving guidelines for the further development of kinetic models. By comparing the Boltzmann equation and its model equations using test cases with different nonequilibrium types, two factors (the information held by nonequilibrium moments and the different relaxation rates of high- and low-speed molecules) are found useful for adjusting the behaviors of modeled collision terms in kinetic regime. The usefulness of these two factors are confirmed by a generalized model collision term derived from a mathematical relation between the Boltzmann equation and BGK equation that is also derived in this paper. After the analysis of the difference between the Boltzmann equation and the BGK equation, an attempt at approximating the collision term is proposed.

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Discrete unified gas-kinetic scheme (DUGKS) is a multi-scale numerical method for flows from continuum limit to free molecular limit, and is especially suitable for the simulation of multi-scale flows, benefiting from its multi-scale property. To reduce integration error of the DUGKS and ensure the conservation property of the collision term in isothermal flow simulations, a Conserved-DUGKS (C-DUGKS) is proposed. On the other hand, both DUGKS and C-DUGKS adopt Cartesian-type discrete velocity space, in which Gaussian and Newton-Cotes numerical quadrature are used for calculating the macroscopic physical variables in low speed and high speed flows, respectively. While, the Cartesian-type discrete velocity space leads to huge computational cost and memory demand. In this paper, the isothermal C-DUGKS is extended to the non-isothermal case by adopting coupled mass and inertial energy distribution functions. Moreover, since the unstructured mesh, such as the triangular mesh in two dimensional case, is more flexible than the structured Cartesian mesh, it is introduced to the discrete velocity space of C-DUGKS, such that more discrete velocity points can be arranged in the velocity regions that enclose large number of molecules, and only a few discrete velocity points need to be arranged in the velocity regions with small amount of molecules in it. By using the unstructured discrete velocity space, the computational efficiency of C-DUGKS is significantly increased. A series of numerical tests in a wide range of Knudsen numbers, such as the Couette flow, lid-driven cavity flow, two-dimensional rarefied Riemann problem and the supersonic cylinder flows, are carried out to examine the validity and efficiency of the present method.

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In this paper, the original discrete unified gas kinetic scheme (DUGKS) is extended to arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) framework for simulating the low-speed continuum and rarefied flows with moving boundaries. For ALE method, the mesh moving velocity is introduced into the Boltzmann-BGK equation. The remapping-free scheme is adopted to develop the present ALE-type DUGKS, which avoids the complex rezoning and remapping process in traditional ALE method. As in some application areas, the large discretization errors will be introduced into the simulation if the geometric conservation is not guaranteed. Three compliant approaches of the geometric conservation law (GCL) are discussed and a uniform flow test case is conducted to validate these schemes. To illustrate the performance of present ALE-type DUGKS, four test cases are carried out. Two of them are the continuum flow cases, which are the flows around the oscillating circular cylinder and the pitching NACA0012 airfoil, respectively. Others are the rarefied flow cases, one is the moving piston driven by the rarefied gas, another is the flow caused by the plate oscillating in its normal direction. The results of all test cases are in good agreement with the other numerical and/or experimental results, demonstrating the capability of present ALE-type DUGKS to cope with the moving boundary problems at

A modified unified kinetic scheme for the prediction of fluid flow behaviors in all flow regimes is described. The time evolution of macrovariables at the cell interface is calculated with the idea that both free transport and collision mechanisms should be considered. The time evolution of macrovariables is obtained through the conservation constraints. The time evolution of local Maxwellian distribution is obtained directly through the one-to-one mapping from the evolution of macrovariables. These improvements provide more physical realities in flow behaviors and more accurate numerical results in all flow regimes especially in the complex transition flow regime. In addition, the improvement steps introduce no extra computational complexity.