Physics

This paper presents a new methodology for structural reliability analysis via stochastic finite element method (SFEM). A novel sample-based SFEM is firstly used to compute structural stochastic responses of all spatial points at the same time, which decouples the stochastic response into a combination of a series of deterministic responses with random variable coefficients, and solves corresponding stochastic finite element equation through an iterative algorithm. Based on the stochastic response obtained by the SFEM, the limit state function described by the stochastic response and the multidimensional integral encountered in reliability analysis can be computed without any difficulties, and failure probabilities of all spatial points are calculated once time. The proposed method can be applied to high-dimensional stochastic problems, and one of the most challenging issues encountered in high-dimensional reliability analysis, known as Curse of Dimensionality, can be circumvented without expensive computational costs. Three practical examples, including large-scale and high-dimensional reliability analysis, are given to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method in comparison to the Monte Carlo simulation.

We propose a set of quick and easy approximate characteristic variables for higher-order reconstructions of shock capturing schemes for magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). Numerical experiments suggest that the reconstructions using the approximate characteristic variables are more robust than those using the conservative or primitive variables, while their computational efficiencies are comparable. The approximate characteristic variables are simple compared to the full characteristic variables for MHD, and can be a practical choice of reconstruction variables.

The discrete unified gas kinetic scheme (DUGKS) is a new finite volume (FV) scheme for continuum and rarefied flows which combines the benefits of both Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) and unified gas kinetic scheme (UGKS). By reconstruction of gas distribution function using particle velocity characteristic line, flux contains more detailed information of fluid flow and more concrete physical nature. In this work, a simplified DUGKS is proposed with reconstruction stage on a whole time step instead of half time step in original DUGKS. Using temporal/spatial integral Boltzmann Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) equation, the transformed distribution function with inclusion of collision effect is constructed. The macro and mesoscopic fluxes of the cell on next time step is predicted by reconstruction of transformed distribution function at interfaces along particle velocity characteristic lines. According to the conservation law, the macroscopic variables of the cell on next time step can be updated through its macroscopic flux. Equilibrium distribution function on next time step can also be updated. Gas distribution function is updated by FV scheme through its predicted mesoscopic flux in a time step. Compared with the original DUGKS, the computational process of the proposed method is more concise because of the omission of half time step flux calculation. Numerical time step is only limited by the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy (CFL) condition and relatively good stability has been preserved. Several test cases, including the Couette flow, lid-driven cavity flow, laminar flows over a flat plate, a circular cylinder, and an airfoil, as well as micro cavity flow cases are conducted to validate present scheme. The numerical simulation results agree well with the references' results.

When describing the deflagration-to-detonation transition in solid granular explosives mixed with gaseous products of combustion, a well-developed two-phase mixture model is the compressible Baer-Nunziato (BN) model, containing solid and gas phases. If this model is numerically simulated by a conservative Godunov-type scheme, spurious oscillations are likely to generate from porosity interfaces, which may result from the average process of conservative variables that violates the continuity of Riemann invariants across porosity interfaces. In order to suppress the oscillations, this paper proposes a staggered-projection Godunov-type scheme over a fixed gas-solid staggered grid, by enforcing that solid contacts with porosity jumps are always inside gaseous grid cells and other discontinuities appear at gaseous cell interfaces. This scheme is based on a standard Godunov scheme for the Baer-Nunziato model on gaseous cells and guarantees the continuity of the Riemann invariants associated with the solid contact discontinuities across porosity jumps. While porosity interfaces are moving, a projection process fully takes into account the continuity of associated Riemann invariants and ensure that porosity jumps remain inside gaseous cells. This staggered-projection Godunov-type scheme is well-balanced with good numerical performance not only on suppressing spurious oscillations near porosity interfaces but also capturing strong discontinuities such as shocks.

In this paper, a physics-oriented stochastic kinetic scheme will be developed that includes random inputs from both flow and electromagnetic fields via a hybridization of stochastic Galerkin and collocation methods. Based on the BGK-type relaxation model of the multi-component Boltzmann equation, a scale-dependent kinetic central-upwind flux function is designed in both physical and particle velocity space, and the governing equations in the discrete temporal-spatial-random domain are constructed. By solving Maxwell's equations with the wave-propagation method, the evolutions of ions, electrons and electromagnetic field are coupled throughout the simulation. We prove that the scheme is formally asymptotic-preserving in the Vlasov, magnetohydrodynamical, and neutral Euler regimes with the inclusion of random variables. Therefore, it can be used for the study of multi-scale and multi-physics plasma system under the effects of uncertainties, and provide scale-adaptive physical solutions under different ratios among numerical cell size, particle mean free path and gyroradius (or time step, local particle collision time and plasma period). Numerical experiments including one-dimensional Landau Damping, the two-stream instability and the Brio-Wu shock tube problem with one- to three-dimensional velocity settings, and each under stochastic initial conditions with one-dimensional uncertainty, will be presented to validate the scheme.

In simulations of compressible flows, the conservative finite difference method (FDM) based on the nonlinear upwind schemes, e.g. WENO5, might violate free-stream preserving (FP), due to the loss of the geometric conservation law (GCL) identity when applied on the curvilinear grids. Although some techniques on FP have been proposed previously, no general rule is given for this issue. In this paper, by rearranging the upwind dissipation of the nonlinear schemes as a combination of sub-stencil reconstructions (taking WENO5 as an example), it can be proved that the upwind dissipation diminishes under the uniform flow condition if the metrics yield an identical value under the same schemes with these reconstructions, making the free-stream condition be preserved. According to this sufficient condition, the novel FP metrics are constructed for WENO5 and WENO7. By this means the original forms of these WENO schemes can be kept. In addition, the accuracy of these schemes can be retained as well with a simple accuracy compensation by replacing the central part fluxes with a high-order one. Various validations indicate that the present FP schemes retain the great capability to resolve the smooth regions accurately and capture the discontinuities robustly.

In this paper, a third-order compact gas-kinetic scheme is firstly proposed for three-dimensional computation for the compressible Euler and Navier-Stokes solutions. The scheme achieves its compactness due to the time-dependent gas distribution function in GKS, which provides not only the fluxes but also the time accurate flow variables in the next time level at a cell interface. As a result, the cell averaged first-order spatial derivatives of flow variables can be obtained naturally through the Gauss's theorem. Then, a third-order compact reconstruction involving the cell averaged values and their first-order spatial derivatives can be achieved. The trilinear interpolation is used to treat possible non-coplanar elements on general hexahedral mesh. The constrained least-square technique is applied to improve the accuracy in the smooth case. To deal with both smooth and discontinuous flows, a new HWENO reconstruction is designed in the current scheme by following the ideas in Zhu, 2018. No identification of troubled cells is needed in the current scheme. In contrast to the Riemann solver-based method, the compact scheme can achieve a third-order temporal accuracy with the two-stage two-derivative temporal discretization, instead of the three-stage Runge-Kutta method. Overall, the proposed scheme inherits the high accuracy and efficiency of the previous ones in two-dimensional case. The desired third-order accuracy can be obtained with curved boundary. The robustness of the scheme has been validated through many cases, including strong shocks in both inviscid and viscous flow computations. Quantitative comparisons for both smooth and discontinuous cases show that the current third-order scheme can give competitive results against the fifth-order non-compact GKS under the same mesh. A large CFL number around 0.5 can be used in the present scheme.

In this paper, the unified gas-kinetic wave-particle (UGKWP) method has been constructed on three-dimensional unstructured mesh with parallel computing for multiscale flow simulation. Following the direct modeling methodology of the unified gas-kinetic scheme (UGKS), the UGKWP method models the flow dynamics uniformly in different regime and gets the local cell's Knudsen number dependent numerical solution directly without the requirement of kinetic scale cell resolution. The UGKWP method is composed of evolution of deterministic wave and stochastic particles. With the dynamic wave-particle decomposition, the UGKWP method is able to capture the continuum wave interaction and rarefied particle transport under a unified framework and achieves the high efficiency in different flow regime. The UGKWP flow solver is validated by many three-dimensional test cases of different Mach and Knudsen numbers, which include 3D shock tube problem, lid-driven cavity flow, high-speed flow passing through a cubic object, and hypersonic flow around a space vehicle. The parallel performance has been tested on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, and reasonable parallel performance has been observed up to one thousand core processing. Due to wave-particle formulation, the UGKWP method has great potential in solving three-dimensional multiscale transport with the co-existence of continuum and rarefied flow regimes, especially for the high-speed rarefied and continuum flow around space vehicle in near space flight.

In this paper, we employed a transfer learning technique to predict the Nusselt number for natural convection flows in enclosures. Specifically, we considered the benchmark problem of a two-dimensional square enclosure with isolated horizontal walls and vertical walls at constant temperatures. The Rayleigh and Prandtl numbers are sufficient parameters to simulate this problem numerically. We adopted two approaches to this problem: Firstly, we made use of a multi-grid dataset in order to train our artificial neural network in a cost-effective manner. By monitoring the training losses for this dataset, we detected any significant anomalies that stemmed from an insufficient grid size, which we further corrected by altering the grid size or adding more data. Secondly, we sought to endow our metamodel with the ability to account for additional input features by performing transfer learning using deep neural networks. We trained a neural network with a single input feature (Rayleigh) and extended it to incorporate the effects of a second feature (Prandtl). We also considered the case of hollow enclosures, demonstrating that our learning framework can be applied to systems with higher physical complexity, while bringing the computational and training costs down.

We present a finite element based variational interface-preserving and conservative phase-field formulation for the modeling of incompressible two-phase flows with surface tension dynamics. The preservation of the hyperbolic tangent interface profile of the convective Allen-Cahn phase-field formulation relies on a novel time-dependent mobility model. The mobility coefficient is adjusted adaptively as a function of gradients of the velocity and the order parameter in the diffuse interface region in such a way that the free energy minimization properly opposes the convective distortion. The ratio of the convective distortion to the free energy minimization is termed as the convective distortion parameter, which characterizes the deviation from the hyperbolic tangent shape due to the convection effect. The mass conservation is achieved by enforcing a Lagrange multiplier with both temporal and spatial dependence on the phase-field function. We integrate the interface-preserving and conservative phase-field formulation with the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and the continuum surface tension force model for the simulation of incompressible two-phase flows. A positivity preserving scheme designed for the boundedness and stability of the solution is employed for the variational discretization using unstructured finite elements. We examine the convergence and accuracy of the Allen-Cahn phase-field solver through a generic one-dimensional bistable diffusion-reaction system in a stretching flow. We quantify and systematically assess the relative interface thickness error and the relative surface tension force error with respect to the convective distortion parameter. Two- and three-dimensional rising bubble cases are further simulated to examine the effectiveness of the proposed model on the volume-preserving mean curvature flow and the interface-preserving capability.