A unified stochastic particle method based on the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook model for polyatomic gases and its combination with DSMC

•A particle-particle hybrid approach by combining the USP-BGK and DSMC methods is developed for polyatomic gases.•The USP-BGK method employs an ES-BGK model with discrete vibrational energy and can achieve second-order accuracy in the fluid limit.•The efficiency of the USPBGK-DSMC hybrid method is excellent for the simulation of multi-scale hypersonic flows. Simulating hypersonic flow around a space vehicle is challenging because of the multiscale and nonequilibrium nature inherent in these flows. To effectively deal with such flows, a hybrid scheme combining the stochastic particle Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) method with direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) was developed recently, but only for monatomic gases (Fei et al. (2021) [29]). In this paper, the particle-particle hybrid method is extended to polyatomic gas flows. In the near continuum regime, employing the Ellipsoidal–Statistical BGK model proposed by Dauvois et al. (2021) [22] with discrete levels of vibrational energy, the stochastic particle BGK method for polyatomic gases is first established following the idea of the unified stochastic particle BGK (USP-BGK) scheme. It is proven to be of second-order accuracy in the fluid limit. After that, the USP-BGK scheme with rotational and vibrational energies is combined with DSMC to construct a hybrid scheme. The present hybrid scheme for polyatomic gases is validated with numerical tests of homogeneous relaxation, 1D shock structure and 2D hypersonic flows past a wedge and a cylinder. Compared to the other stochastic particle methods, the proposed hybrid scheme can achieve higher accuracy at a much lower computational cost. Therefore, it is a more efficient tool to study multiscale hypersonic flows.