Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

An efficient particle Fokker–Planck algorithm for rarefied gas flows

Journal Article · · Journal of Computational Physics

This paper is devoted to the algorithmic improvement and careful analysis of the Fokker–Planck kinetic model derived by Jenny et al. [1] and Gorji et al. [2]. The motivation behind the Fokker–Planck based particle methods is to gain efficiency in low Knudsen rarefied gas flow simulations, where conventional direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) becomes expensive. This can be achieved due to the fact that the resulting model equations are continuous stochastic differential equations in velocity space. Accordingly, the computational particles evolve along independent stochastic paths and thus no collision needs to be calculated. Therefore the computational cost of the solution algorithm becomes independent of the Knudsen number. In the present study, different computational improvements were persuaded in order to augment the method, including an accurate time integration scheme, local time stepping and noise reduction. For assessment of the performance, gas flow around a cylinder and lid driven cavity flow were studied. Convergence rates, accuracy and computational costs were compared with respect to DSMC for a range of Knudsen numbers (from hydrodynamic regime up to above one). In all the considered cases, the model together with the proposed scheme give rise to very efficient yet accurate solution algorithms.

OSTI ID:
22314857
Journal Information:
Journal of Computational Physics, Journal Name: Journal of Computational Physics Vol. 262; ISSN JCTPAH; ISSN 0021-9991
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

Similar Records

Parallel Fokker–Planck-DSMC algorithm for rarefied gas flow simulation in complex domains at all Knudsen numbers
Journal Article · Sat Dec 31 23:00:00 EST 2016 · Journal of Computational Physics · OSTI ID:22622230

Importance sampling variance reduction for the Fokker–Planck rarefied gas particle method
Journal Article · Mon Nov 14 23:00:00 EST 2016 · Journal of Computational Physics · OSTI ID:22622209

Variance reduction for Fokker–Planck based particle Monte Carlo schemes
Journal Article · Sat Aug 15 00:00:00 EDT 2015 · Journal of Computational Physics · OSTI ID:22465645