Towards realizable hyperbolic moment closures for viscous heat-conducting gas flows based on a maximum-entropy distribution

The ability to predict continuum and transition-regime flows by hyperbolic moment methods offers the promise of several advantages over traditional techniques. These methods offer an extended range of physical validity as compared with the Navier–Stokes equations and can be used for the prediction of many non-equilibrium flows with a lower expense than particle-based methods. Also, the hyperbolic first-order nature of the resulting partial differential equations leads to mathematical and numerical advantages. Moment equations generated through an entropy-maximization principle are particularly attractive due to their apparent robustness; however, their application to practical situations involving viscous, heat-conducting gases has been hampered by several issues. Firstly, the lack of closed-form expressions for closing fluxes leads to numerical expense as many integrals of distribution functions must be computed numerically during the course of a flow computation. Secondly, it has been shown that there exist physically realizable moment states for which the entropy-maximizing problem on which the method is based cannot be solved. Following a review of the theory surrounding maximum-entropy moment closures, this paper shows that both of these problems can be addressed in practice, at least for a simplified one-dimensional gas, and that the resulting flow predictions can be surprisingly good. The numerical results described provide significant motivations for the extension of these ideas to the fully three-dimensional case.