Macroscopic Description of Rarefied Gas Flows in the Transition Regime
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Release | : 2009 |
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The fast-paced growth in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), microfluidic fabrication, porous media applications, biomedical assemblies, space propulsion, and vacuum technology demands accurate and practical transport equations for rarefied gas flows. It is well-known that in rarefied situations, due to strong deviations from the continuum regime, traditional fluid models such as Navier-Stokes-Fourier (NSF) fail. The shortcoming of continuum models is rooted in nonequilibrium behavior of gas particles in miniaturized and/or low-pressure devices, where the Knudsen number (Kn) is sufficiently large. Since kinetic solutions are computationally very expensive, there has been a great desire to develop macroscopic transport equations for dilute gas flows, and as a result, several sets of extended equations are proposed for gas flow in nonequilibrium states. However, applications of many of these extended equations are limited due to their instabilities and/or the absence of suitable boundary conditions. In this work, we concentrate on regularized 13-moment (R13) equations, which are a set of macroscopic transport equations for flows in the transition regime, i.e., Kn1. The R13 system provides a stable set of equations in Super-Burnett order, with a great potential to be a powerful CFD tool for rarefied flow simulations at moderate Knudsen numbers. The goal of this research is to implement the R13 equations for problems of practical interest in arbitrary geometries. This is done by transformation of the R13 equations and boundary conditions into general curvilinear coordinate systems. Next steps include adaptation of the transformed equations in order to solve some of the popular test cases, i.e., shear-driven, force-driven, and temperature-driven flows in both planar and curved flow passages. It is shown that inexpensive analytical solutions of the R13 equations for the considered problems are comparable to expensive numerical solutions of the Boltzmann equation. The n.