Unified Flow Solver

A variety of gas flow problems are characterized by the presence of rarefied and continuum domains. In a rarefied domain, the mean free path of gas molecules is comparable to (or larger than) a characteristic scale of the system. The rarefied domains are best described by particle models such as Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC); or, they involve solution of the Boltzmann kinetic equation for the particle distribution function. The continuum flows are best described by Euler or Navier-Stokes equations in terms of average flow velocity, gas density, and temperature and are solved by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes. The development of hybrid solvers combining kinetic and continuum models has been an important area of research over the last decade. Potential applications of such solvers range from high-altitude flight to gas flow in microsystems.