Two-stage fourth-order gas-kinetic scheme for three-dimensional Euler and Navier-Stokes solutions

For the one-stage third-order gas-kinetic scheme (GKS), successful applications have been achieved for the three-dimensional compressible flows [Pan, L., K. Xu, Q. Li, and J. Li. 2016. “An Efficient and Accurate Two-stage Fourth-order Gas-kinetic Scheme for the Navier-Stokes Equations.” Journal of Computational Physics 326: 197–221]. The high-order accuracy of the scheme is obtained by integrating a multidimensional time-accurate gas distribution function over the cell interface within a time step without using Gaussian quadrature points and Runge-Kutta time-stepping technique. However, to the further increase of the order of the scheme, such as the fourth-order one, the one step formulation becomes very complicated for the multidimensional flow. Recently, a two-stage fourth-order GKS with high efficiency has been constructed for two-dimensional inviscid and viscous flow computations ([Li, J., and Z. Du. 2016. “A Two-stage Fourth Order Time-accurate Discretization for Lax-Wendroff Type Flow Solvers I. Hyperbolic Conservation Laws.” SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing 38: 3046–3069]; Pan et al. 2016), and the scheme uses the time accurate flux function and its time derivatives. In this paper, a fourth-order GKS is developed for the three-dimensional flows under the two-stage framework. Based on the three-dimensional WENO reconstruction and flux evaluation at Gaussian quadrature points on a cell interface, the high-order accuracy in space is achieved first. Then, the two-stage time stepping method provides the high accuracy in time. In comparison with the formal third-order GKS [Pan, L., and K. Xu. 2015. “A Third-order Gas-kinetic Scheme for Three-dimensional Inviscid and Viscous Flow Computations.” Computers & Fluids 119: 250–260], the current fourth-order method not only improves the accuracy of the scheme, but also reduces the complexity of the gas-kinetic flux solver greatly. More importantly, the fourth-order GKS has the same robustness as the second-order shock capturing scheme [Xu, K. 2001. “A Gas-kinetic BGK Scheme for the Navier-Stokes Equations and its Connection with Artificial Dissipation and Godunov Method.” Journal of Computational Physics 171: 289–335]. Numerical results validate the outstanding reliability and applicability of the scheme for three-dimensional flows, such as the cases related to turbulent simulations.