A discretization of Boltzmann’s collision operator with provable convergence

Abstract

The discretization of the right-hand side of the Boltzmann equation (aka the collision operator) on uniform grids generally suffers from some well known problems prohibiting the construction of deterministic high order discretizations which exactly sustain the basic properties of the collision operator. These problems mainly relate to problems arising from the discretization of spheres on uniform grids and the necessity that the discretization must possess some symmetry properties in order to provide the discrete versions of properties stemming from the continuous collision operator (number of collision invariants, avoidance of artificial collision invariants, type of equilibrium solutions, H-Theorem). We present a scheme to construct discretizations in 2 dimensions with arbitrarily high convergence orders on uniform grids, which are comparable to the approach by Rogier and Schneider [1] and the subsequent works by Michel and Schneider as well as Panferov and Heintz [2, 3] who used Farey sequences for the discretization. Moreover we take a closer look at this discretization in the framework of discrete velocity models to present results governing the correct collision invariants, lack of artificial collision invariants, the H-Theorem and the correct equilibrium solutions. Furthermore we classify lattice group models (LGpM) in the context of DVMs to transfer the high convergence order of these discretizations into the context of LGpMs and finally we take a short look at the numerical complexity.

Translation invariant kinetic models on integer lattices

“…(The order of schemes like those of the paper in two and three dimensions is studied and discussed in detail in [6].) Instead we shortly discuss the problem of full rotational symmetry in the limit h|ν| ↘ 0 (asymptotic rotational invariance).…”