
1. Introduction
Mars exploration programs are currently experiencing a revival, such as amazing Mars
robotic helicopter ”Ingenuity” operating on Mars [1]. Mars’s atmosphere consists of 95.32%
carbon dioxide (CO2). For accurate predictions of surface drag and heat flux on Martian
vehicles, it is necessary to take the peculiarities of CO2into account. Different with the
dominant diatomic gases nitrogen (N2) and oxygen (O2) on earth, CO2is a linear and
symmetric triatomic molecular, which has three vibrational modes [2]. Triatomic molecular
CO2is equipped with the inherent thermal non-equilibrium multi-temperature effects arising
from the interactions among the translational, rotational and vibrational modes [3, 4].
Carbon dioxide is widely studied in the applications of physical chemistry and fluid
dynamics, i.e., CO2-N2gas laser system [5], environmental green-house problems [6], and
Mars entry vehicles [7, 8, 9]. Complex molecular structure and multiple internal energy
relaxation mechanisms in CO2 significantly affect its physical and chemical properties [10].
In fluids community, of special interest is the evaluation of bulk viscosity in CO2. Stokes’
viscosity relation does not hold for CO2[11], as the bulk viscosity can be thousands of
times larger than the shear viscosity. Many research works are engaged in experimental and
theoretical studies in the bulk viscosity of CO2[12, 13]. Recent experiments [14, 15] show
that the vibrational modes contribute dominantly to the bulk viscosity of CO2, and the
bulk viscosity from rotational modes is only one half of its shear viscosity approximately
[15]. Thus, the vibrational modes should be modelled carefully when simulating CO2flows.
In view of the importance of multiple internal energy modes, the multiple internal energy
relaxation mechanisms of CO2[3, 4] have been modeled and analyzed, which confirm that
equilibrium one-temperature gas flow description is not valid for CO2flows even under room
temperature (i.e., 300K). To the author’s knowledge, the thermal non-equilibrium physical
models considering the multi-temperature effects of CO2and its applications in turbulent
flows are seldom reported. For accurate predictions of CO2turbulence, it is necessary to
take the three-temperature effects of CO2into account.
In the past few decades, the gas-kinetic scheme (GKS) based on the Bhatnagar-Gross-
Krook (BGK) model [16, 17] has been developed systematically for the computations from
low speed flows to hypersonic ones [18, 19]. Based on the time-dependent flux solver, in-
cluding generalized Riemann problem solver and GKS [20, 21], a reliable two-stage fourth-
order framework was provided for developing the high-order GKS (HGKS) into fourth-order
accuracy. With the advantage of finite volume GKS and HGKS, they have been natu-
rally implemented as a direct numerical simulation (DNS) tool in simulating turbulent flows
[22, 23, 24], especially for compressible turbulence [25, 26]. Aiming to conduct the large-scale
DNS, a parallel in-house computational platform of HGKS has been developed in uniform
grids and curvilinear grids [27, 28], with high efficiency, fourth-order accuracy and super ro-
bustness. In addition, with the discretization of particle velocity space, a unified gas-kinetic
∗Corresponding author
Email addresses: caogy@sustech.edu.cn (Guiyu Cao), syp@mech.pku.edu.cn (Yipeng Shi),
makxu@ust.hk (Kun Xu), chensy@sustc.edu.cn (Shiyi Chen)
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