Unified Kinetic Approach for Simulation of Gas Flows in Rarefied and Continuum Regimes
Abstract
This report was developed under a SBIR contract. The objective of this effort was to develop a computation fluid dynamics tool for air and space flight. Flow fields characterized by the simultaneous presence of continuum and rarefied regimes arise in many important applications, ranging from re-entry of aerospace vehicles to micro-fluidics. In this Phase II SBIR Project, we have developed a Unified Flow Solver with adaptive mesh and algorithm refinement based on direct numerical solution of the Boltzmann equation coupled to kinetic schemes of gas dynamics. Our strategy allowed easy coupling of the continuum and Boltzmann solvers in a hybrid code with automatic domain decomposition. We have demonstrated the UFS capabilities for several one-component gas flows and have confirmed that the hybrid method results in significant savings by limiting expensive kinetic solutions only to the regions where they are needed. The UFS could automatically introduce or remove kinetic patches to maximize accuracy and efficiency of simulations. We have extended UFS to molecular gases with rotationally and vibrationally degrees of freedom and to multi-component reactive gas mixtures. It was demonstrated that the UFS methodology could provide an efficient solution to practical problems of polyatomic gas mixtures of different degrees of rarefaction.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2007
- Accession Number
- ADA476170
Entities
People
- Anna Frolova
- Filix Tcheremissine
- Robert Arslanbekov
- Sami Bayyuk
- Sergey Zabelok
- Vladimir Aristov
- Vladimir Kolobov