A BGK-based Discontinuous Galerkin Method for the Navier-Stokes Equations on Arbitrary Grids

A discontinuous Galerkin Method based on a Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) formulation is presented for the solution of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations on arbitrary grids. The idea behind this approach is to combine the robustness of the BGK scheme with the accuracy of the DG methods in an effort to develop a more accurate, efficient, and robust method for numerical simulations of viscous flows in a wide range of flow regimes. Unlike the traditional discontinuous Galerkin methods, where a Local Discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) formulation is usually used to discretize the viscous fluxes in the Navier-Stokes equations, this DG method uses a BGK scheme to compute the fluxes which not only couples the convective and dissipative terms together, but also includes both discontinuous and continuous representation in the flux evaluation at a cell interface through a simple hybrid gas distribution function. The developed method is used to compute a variety of viscous flow problems on arbitrary grids. The numerical results obtained by this BGKDG method are extremely promising and encouraging in terms of both accuracy and robustness, indicating its ability and potential to become not just a competitive but simply a superior approach than the current available numerical methods.