An immersed-boundary method for compressible viscous flows and its application in the gas-kinetic BGK scheme

Abstract An immersed-boundary (IB) method is proposed and applied in the gas-kinetic BGK scheme to simulate incompressible and compressible viscous flows with complex stationary and moving boundaries on stationary Cartesian grids. In this method the ghost-cell technique is used to satisfy the boundary condition on the immersed boundary. A novel idea, “local boundary determination”, is put forward to identify the ghost cells, each of which may have several different ghost-cell constructions corresponding to different boundary segments. Thus, the singular behavior of the ghost cell is eliminated. Furthermore, the so-called “fresh-cell” problem that occurs when implementing the IB method in a moving-boundary simulation is resolved by a simple temporal extrapolation. The method is first applied in the gas-kinetic BGK scheme to simulate the Taylor–Couette flow, wherein the second-order spatial accuracy of the method is validated and the “super-convergence” of the BGK scheme is observed. After that the flow between a circular cylinder and a square cylinder is used as a test case to showcase the advantage of this method in resolving the singularity problem. Then the supersonic flow around a stationary cylinder, the incompressible flow around an oscillating cylinder and the compressible flow around a moving airfoil are simulated to verify that this method can be used to simulate compressible flows and handle moving boundaries. These numerical tests demonstrate the good performance of the proposed immersed-boundary method for the study of incompressible/compressible flow problems with complex stationary/moving boundaries.