A new mixed Boltzmann-BGK model for mixtures solved with an IMEX finite volume scheme on unstructured meshes

In this work, we consider a novel model for a binary mixture of inert gases. The model, which preserves the structure of the original Boltzmann equations, combines integro-differential collision operators with BGK relaxation terms in each kinetic equation: the first involving only collisions among particles of the same species, while the second ones taking into account the inter–species interactions. We prove consistency of the model: conservation properties, positivity of all temperatures, H-theorem and convergence to a global equilibrium in the shape of a global Maxwell distribution. We also derive hydrodynamic equations under different collisional regimes. In a second part, to numerically solve the governing equations, we introduce a class of time and space high order finite volume schemes that are able to capture the behaviors of the different hydrodynamic limit models: the classical Euler equations as well as the multi-velocities and temperatures Euler system. The methods work by integrating the distribution functions over arbitrarily shaped and closed control volumes in 2D using Central Weighted ENO (CWENO) techniques and make use of spectral methods for the approximation of the Boltzmann integrals with high order Implicit-Explicit (IMEX) Runge Kutta schemes. For these methods, we prove accuracy and preservation of the discrete asymptotic states. In the numerical section we first show that the methods indeed possess the theoretical order of accuracy for different regimes and second we analyse their capacity in solving different two dimensional problems arising in kinetic theory. To speed up the computational time, all simulations are run with MPI parallelization on 64 cores, thus showing the potentiality of the proposed methods to be used for HPC (High Performance Computing) on massively parallel architectures.