Adaptive Sparse-grid Discontinuous Galerkin Approximations the Bhatnagar--Gross--Krook Model

Abstract

This work studies adaptive sparse-grid discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretizations for the Bhatnagar--Gross--Krook (BGK) model, a kinetic equation posed in four- and six-dimensional phase-space. Standard DG methods are rendered impractical for the BGK model by the curse of dimensionality, motivating compressed representations that adapt to the solution in time. Using the adaptive sparse-grid DG method, we quantify accuracy and compression by comparing the adaptive degrees of freedom to full-grid DG methods and by assessing the resulting kinetic and fluid quantities in both fluid and rarefied regimes. Test cases include a relaxation problem, a multidimensional Sod shock tube, and shear/expansion flows used in prior low-rank BGK studies. To build an efficient Maxwellian evaluation without violating conservation, a central obstacle for structure-perserving BGK simulations, we introduce a hybrid interpolation strategy that exploits velocity separability to recover the correct discrete collision invariants and prove conservation of the resulting discrete collision operator on adaptive sparse grids. Our results show that the adaptive sparse-grid strategy can recover accurate and physically relevant solutions with sharp gradients, and the method reduces the active degrees of freedom by factors ranging from several-fold to several orders of magnitude, with the largest reductions occurring in the six-dimensional examples. All computations are performed with the open-source ASGarD adaptive sparse-grid DG library.