Unified preserving properties of kinetic schemes

The kinetic theory provides a physical basis for developing multiscale methods for gas flows covering a wide range of flow regimes. A particular challenge for kinetic schemes is whether they can capture the correct hydrodynamic behaviors of the system in the continuum regime (i.e., as the Knudsen number ε≪1) without enforcing kinetic scale resolution. At the current stage, the main approach to analyze such a property is the asymptotic preserving (AP) concept, which aims to show whether a kinetic scheme reduces to a solver for the hydrodynamic equations as ε→0, such as the shock capturing scheme for the Euler equations. However, the detailed asymptotic properties of the kinetic scheme are indistinguishable when ε is small but finite under the AP framework. To distinguish different characteristics of kinetic schemes, in this paper we introduce the concept of unified preserving (UP) aiming at assessing asymptotic orders of a kinetic scheme by employing the modified equation approach and Chapman-Enskon analysis. It is shown that the UP properties of a kinetic scheme generally depend on the spatial and temporal accuracy and closely on the interconnections among three scales (kinetic scale, numerical scale, and hydrodynamic scale) and their corresponding coupled dynamics. Specifically, the numerical resolution and specific discretization of particle transport and collision determine the flow physics of the scheme in different regimes, especially in the near continuum limit. As two examples, the UP methodology is applied to analyze the discrete unified gas-kinetic scheme and a second-order implicit-explicit Runge-Kutta scheme in their asymptotic behaviors in the continuum limit.