A Runge–Kutta discontinuous Galerkin method for viscous flow equations

This paper presents a Runge–Kutta discontinuous Galerkin (RKDG) method for viscous flow computation. The construction of the RKDG method is based on a gas-kinetic formulation, which not only couples the convective and dissipative terms together, but also includes both discontinuous and continuous representation in the flux evaluation at a cell interface through a simple hybrid gas distribution function. Due to the intrinsic connection between the gas-kinetic BGK model and the Navier–Stokes equations, the Navier–Stokes flux is automatically obtained by the present method. Numerical examples for both one dimensional (1D) and two dimensional (2D) compressible viscous flows are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and shock capturing capability of the current RKDG method.