A p-multigrid compact gas-kinetic scheme for steady-state acceleration

In this paper, the high-order compact gas-kinetic scheme (CGKS) on three-dimensional hybrid unstructured mesh is further developed with the p-multigrid technique for steady-state solution acceleration. The p-multigrid strategy is a two-level algorithm. On the high-order level, the high-order CGKS is used to evolve both cell-averaged conservative flow variables and their gradients under high-order compact initial reconstruction at the beginning of next time step. On the low-order level, starting from the high-order level solution the cell-averaged conservative flow variables is evolved by a first-order scheme, where implicit backward Euler smoother is adopted for accelerating the convergence of steady-state solution. The final iterative updating scheme becomes numerically simple and computationally efficient. The effectiveness of the p-multigrid method is validated in both subsonic and supersonic flow simulations in two- and three-dimensional space with hybrid unstructured mesh. One order of magnitude speedup in the convergence rate has be achieved by the approach in comparison with the explicit counterpart.