Two-surface problems of a multicomponent mixture of vapors and noncondensable gases in the continuum limit in the light of kinetic theory

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The steady behavior of a multicomponent mixture of vapors and noncondensable gases between two parallel plane condensed phases for small Knudsen numbers, especially for the continuum limit (i.e., the limit as the Knudsen number vanishes), is investigated in the light of kinetic theory. By a systematic asymptotic analysis of the Boltzmann equation with kinetic boundary conditions, the flow due to evaporation and condensation on the condensed phases is shown to vanish in the continuum limit, and then the system of fluid-dynamic-type equations and their boundary conditions which describes the behavior in the limit is derived. On the basis of the system, it is shown that the vanishingly weak evaporation and condensation give a finite effect on the behavior of the mixture in the continuum limit. This is an example of the ghost effect discovered recently by Sone and co-workers [e.g., Y. Sone et al., Phys. Fluids 8, 628 and 3403 (1996); Y. Sone, in Rarefied Gas Dynamics, edited by C. Shen (Peking U.P., Beijing, 1997), p. 3]. Finally, for the case of a binary mixture of a vapor and a noncondensable gas, two typical problems, the simultaneous mass and heat transfer and the plane Couette flow, are considered to demonstrate the effect more concretely. The result is also compared with that obtained by the numerical analysis of the Boltzmann equation by the direct simulation Monte Carlo method.