Kinetic closure of turbulence: collision-side modeling beyond the filtered Boltzmann equation

Abstract

This article extends a recently introduced kinetic closure of turbulence by developing its theoretical framework, operational realizations, and validation. In contrast with filtered Navier--Stokes formulations, filtering the Boltzmann equation retains subgrid transport under the linear streaming operator, so that unresolved physics is concentrated on the collision side. We show that in dilute-gas large-eddy simulation, the main limitation of Bhatnagar--Gross--Krook (BGK)-type collision models is not the breakdown of molecular chaos, but the retention of a Markovian collision at a scale where filtering induces finite temporal correlations in the collision product. In a BGK-type framework, the closure problem is dual: one must infer the filtered fine-grained equilibrium, not computable from filtered moments alone, and model the non-Markovian collision dynamics generated by the collision-product covariance. The present framework makes this dual structure explicit and represents the resulting collision-covariance source term through a BGK-like closure built from the equilibrium commutation residual, with the turbulent relaxation frequency given by a first phenomenological realization. The framework relies on a Chapman--Enskog analysis organized by the reference timescale ratio emerging from the nondimensionalization of the kinetic equation, performed in the classical sense, thereby avoiding artificial turbulent scale separations. We show that the Chapman--Enskog structure is not a pure one-parameter Knudsen scaling: the primary ordering is set by the kinetic-to-macroscopic timescale ratio, while higher moments retain an additional Mach dependence through the mixed scaling of particle velocity. The resulting kinetic closures are validated through lattice Boltzmann simulations and compared with the Smagorinsky model and regularization-based collision models.