Nonlinear Rarefied Couette Flow with Heat Transfer

Abstract

In order to calibrate the new, general discrete ordinate method proposed by Huang against the known standard solutions, the proposed method is applied to the problem of nonlinear Couette flow with heat transfer whose numerically exact solutions are available. It is shown that the proposed method yields excellent results over a large range of Knudsen numbers (from free molecular to near-continuum flow regime). In contrast to other methods, an important advantage of the proposed method is the calculation of the local molecular velocity distribution function which is useful in the direct comparison with molecular beam experimental results.