Entropy, Vol. 24, Pages 1110: A Well-Balanced Unified Gas-Kinetic Scheme for Multicomponent Flows under External Force Field (Entropy)

The study of the evolution of the atmosphere requires careful consideration of multicomponent gaseous flows under gravity. The gas dynamics under an external force field is usually associated with an intrinsic multiscale nature due to large particle density variation along the direction of force. A wonderfully diverse set of behaviors of fluids can be observed in different flow regimes. This poses a great challenge for numerical algorithms to accurately and efficiently capture the scale-dependent flow physics. In this paper, a well-balanced unified gas-kinetic scheme (UGKS) for a gas mixture is developed, which can be used for the study of cross-scale multicomponent flows under an external force field. The well-balanced scheme here indicates the capability of a numerical method to evolve a gravitational system under any initial condition to the hydrostatic equilibrium and to keep such a solution. Such a property is crucial for an accurate description of multicomponent gas evolution under an external force field, especially for long-term evolving systems such as galaxy formation. Based on the Boltzmann model equation for gas mixtures, the UGKS leverages the space–time integral solution to construct numerical flux functions and, thus, provides a self-conditioned mechanism to recover typical flow dynamics in various flow regimes. We prove the well-balanced property of the current scheme formally through theoretical analysis and numerical validations. New physical phenomena, including the decoupled transport of different gas components in the transition regime, are presented and studied.