DSMC Simulation of Rarefied Gas Flow in a Single-sided and Double-sided Lid-Driven Cavity

Abstract

The present study is to investigate the behavior of a monoatomic gas enclosed in a cavity with both the top and bottom walls imparting motion to the fluid. The problem is studied for single and double-sided lid-driven flow for various wall velocities as well as parallel and anti-parallel wall motions. These types of flow have many industrial applications such as drying and melt spinning. In contrast to the single-sided flows the vortex patterns obtained in the double-sided flows are different and hence it merits a thorough examination, which is studied in this paper using the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. The DSMC method proposed by G.A. Bird is based on the kinetic theory in which the molecular motion is modeled stochastically. The computational model has been implemented in OpenFOAM software using the solver named dsmcFoam. Various flow features have been examined such as eddies and vortices.