Two-Stage Fourth-order Gas-kinetic Scheme for Three-dimensional Euler and Navier-Stokes Solutions

Abstract

For the one-stage third-order gas-kinetic scheme (GKS), success applications have been achieved for the three-dimensional compressible flow computations [33]. The high-order accuracy of the scheme is obtained directly by integrating a multidimensional time-accurate gas distribution function over the cell interface within a time step without implementing Gaussian quadrature points and Runge-Kutta time-stepping technique. However, for the further increasing the order of the scheme, such as the fourth-order one, the formulation becomes very complicated for the multidimensional flow. Recently, a two-stage fourth-order GKS with high efficiency has been constructed for two-dimensional inviscid and viscous flow computations [22,32], and the scheme uses the time accurate flux function and its time derivatives. In this paper, a fourth-order GKS is developed for the threedimensional flows under the two-stage framework. Based on the three-dimensional WENO reconstruction and flux evaluation at Gaussian quadrature points on a cell interface, the high-order accuracy in space is achieved first. Then, the two-stage time stepping method provides the high accuracy in time. In comparison with the formal third-order GKS [33], the current fourth-order method not only improves the accuracy of the scheme, but also reduces the complexity of the gas-kinetic solver greatly. More importantly, the fourth-order GKS has the same robustness as the second-order shock capturing scheme. This scheme is applied to both inviscid and viscous, and low and high speed flow computations. Numerical results validate the outstanding reliability and applicability of the scheme for three-dimensional flows, such as turbulent one.