High order asymptotic preserving nodal discontinuous Galerkin IMEX schemes for the BGK equation

Abstract In this paper, we develop high-order asymptotic preserving (AP) schemes for the BGK equation in a hyperbolic scaling, which leads to the macroscopic models such as the Euler and compressible Navier-Stokes equations in the asymptotic limit. Our approaches are based on the so-called micro-macro formulation of the kinetic equation which involves a natural decomposition of the problem to the equilibrium and the non-equilibrium parts. The proposed methods are formulated for the BGK equation with constant or spatially variant Knudsen number. The new ingredients for the proposed methods to achieve high order accuracy are the following: we introduce discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretization of arbitrary order of accuracy with nodal Lagrangian basis functions in space; we employ a high order globally stiffly accurate implicit-explicit (IMEX) Runge-Kutta (RK) scheme as time discretization. Two versions of the schemes are proposed: Scheme I is a direct formulation based on the micro-macro decomposition of the BGK equation, while Scheme II, motivated by the asymptotic analysis for the continuous problem, utilizes certain properties of the projection operator. Compared with Scheme I, Scheme II not only has better computational efficiency (the computational cost is reduced by half roughly), but also allows the establishment of a formal asymptotic analysis. Specifically, it is demonstrated that when 0 < ε ≪ 1, Scheme II, up to O(ε2), becomes a local DG discretization with an explicit RK method for the macroscopic compressible Navier-Stokes equations, a method in a similar spirit to the ones in [Bassi and Rabey 1997, Cockburn and Shu 1998]. Numerical results are presented for a wide range of Knudsen number to illustrate the effectiveness and high order accuracy of the methods.