Thomas Rey

Clément Mouhot, Lorenzo Pareschi, Thomas Rey

Discrete-velocity approximations represent a popular way for computing the Boltzmann collision operator. The direct numerical evaluation of such methods involve a prohibitive cost, typically $O(N^{2d+1})$ where $d$ is the dimension of the velocity space. In this paper, following the ideas introduced in [27,28], we derive fast summation techniques for the evaluation of discrete-velocity schemes which permits to reduce the computational cost from $O(N^{2d+1})$ to $O(\bar{N}^d N^d\log_2 N)$, $\bar{N} << N$, with almost no loss of accuracy.

Francis Filbet, Lorenzo Pareschi, Thomas Rey

In this note, we present a general way to construct spectral methods for the collision operator of the Boltzmann equation which preserves exactly the Maxwellian steady-state of the system. We show that the resulting method is able to approximate with spectral accuracy the solution uniformly in time.

Lorenzo Pareschi, Thomas Rey

Many applications involve partial differential equations which admits nontrivial steady state solutions. The design of schemes which are able to describe correctly these equilibrium states may be challenging for numerical methods, in particular for high order ones. In this paper, inspired by micro-macro decomposition methods for kinetic equations, we present a class of schemes which are capable to preserve the steady state solution and achieve high order accuracy for a class of time dependent partial differential equations including nonlinear diffusion equations and kinetic equations. Extension to systems of conservation laws with source terms are also discussed.

Ward Melis, Thomas Rey, Giovanni Samaey

We present high-order, fully explicit projective integration schemes for nonlinear collisional kinetic equations such as the BGK and Boltzmann equation. The methods first take a few small (inner) steps with a simple, explicit method (such as direct forward Euler) to damp out the stiff components of the solution. Then, the time derivative is estimated and used in an (outer) Runge-Kutta method of arbitrary order. The procedure can be recursively repeated on a hierarchy of projective levels to construct telescopic projective integration methods. Based on the spectrum of the linearized collision operator, we deduce that the computational cost of the method is essentially independent of the stiffness of the problem: with an appropriate choice of inner step size, the time step restriction on the outer time step, as well as the number of inner time steps, is independent of the stiffness of the (collisional) source term. In some cases, the number of levels in the telescopic hierarchy depends logarithmically on the stiffness. We illustrate the method with numerical results in one and two spatial dimensions.

Ward Melis, Thomas Rey, Giovanni Samaey

We present a high-order, fully explicit, asymptotic-preserving projective integration scheme for the nonlinear BGK equation. The method first takes a few small (inner) steps with a simple, explicit method (such as direct forward Euler) to damp out the stiff components of the solution. Then, the time derivative is estimated and used in an (outer) Runge-Kutta method of arbitrary order. Based on the spectrum of the linearized BGK operator, we deduce that, with an appropriate choice of inner step size, the time step restriction on the outer time step as well as the number of inner time steps is independent of the stiffness of the BGK source term. We illustrate the method with numerical results in one and two spatial dimensions.

Giacomo Dimarco, Raphaël Loubère, Jacek Narski et al.

In this paper we deal with the extension of the Fast Kinetic Scheme (FKS) [J. Comput. Phys., Vol. 255, 2013, pp 680-698] originally constructed for solving the BGK equation, to the more challenging case of the Boltzmann equation. The scheme combines a robust and fast method for treating the transport part based on an innovative Lagrangian technique supplemented with fast spectral schemes to treat the collisional operator by means of an operator splitting approach. This approach along with several implementation features related to the parallelization of the algorithm permits to construct an efficient simulation tool which is numerically tested against exact and reference solutions on classical problems arising in rarefied gas dynamic. We present results up to the $3$D$\times 3$D case for unsteady flows for the Variable Hard Sphere model which may serve as benchmark for future comparisons between different numerical methods for solving the multidimensional Boltzmann equation. For this reason, we also provide for each problem studied details on the computational cost and memory consumption as well as comparisons with the BGK model or the limit model of compressible Euler equations.

Thomas Rey, Changhui Tan

In this work, we discuss kinetic descriptions of flocking models, of the so-called Cucker-Smale and Motsch-Tadmor types. These models are given by Vlasov-type equations where the interactions taken into account are only given long-range bi-particles interaction potential. We introduce a new exact rescaling velocity method, inspired by a recent work of Filbet and Rey, allowing to observe numerically the flocking behavior of the solutions to these equations, without a need of remeshing or taking a very fine grid in the velocity space. To stabilize the exact method, we also introduce a modification of the classical upwind finite volume scheme which preserves the physical properties of the solution, such as momentum conservation.