Computational and experimental study of gas flows through long channels of various cross sections in the whole range of the Knudsen number

Abstract

A computational and experimental study has been performed for the investigation of fully developed rarefied gas flows through channels of circular, orthogonal, triangular, and trapezoidal cross sections. The theoretical-computational approach is based on the solution of the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook kinetic equation subject to Maxwell diffuse-specular boundary conditions by the discrete velocity method. The experimental work has been performed at the vacuum facility “TRANSFLOW,” at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe and it is based on measuring, for assigned flow rates, the corresponding pressure differences. The computed and measured mass flow rates and conductance are in all cases in very good agreement. In addition, in order to obtain some insight in the flow characteristics, the reference Knudsen, Reynolds, and Mach numbers characterizing the flow at each experimental run have been estimated. Also, the pressure distribution along the channel for several typical cases is presented. Both computational and experimental results cover the whole range of the Knudsen number.