Comparison of Various Pressure Based Boundary Conditions for Three-Dimensional Subsonic DSMC Simulation

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) has been used to simulate flow in a straight microchannel using an in-house parallelized code. In the present work, a comparative study of seven boundary conditions is carried out with respect to time required for achieving steady-state, accuracy in predicting the specified pressure at the boundaries, and the total simulation time required for attaining a statistical error within one percent. The effect of changing the Knudsen number, pressure ratio (PR), and cross aspect ratio (CAR) on these parameters is also studied. The presence of a boundary is seen to affect the simulated pressure in a cell when compared to the specified pressure, the difference being highest for corner cells and least for cells away from walls. All boundary conditions tested work well at the inlet boundary; however, similar results are not obtained at the outlet boundary. For the same cell size, the schemes that employ first- and second-order corrections lead to a smaller pressure difference compared to schemes applying no corrections. The best predictions can be obtained by using first-order corrections with finer cell size close to the boundary. For most of the simulated cases, the boundary condition employing the characteristic scheme with nonequilibrium effect leads to the minimum simulation time. Considering the nonequilibrium effect, prediction of inlet and outlet pressures and the speed of simulation, the characteristic scheme with nonequilibrium effect performs better than all the other schemes, at least over the range of parameters investigated herein.