705 Computational Methods for Kinetic Collisional Transport

Jeffrey Haack, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Irene Gamba, University of Texas at Austin
Thierry Magin, Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics
 
The Boltzmann equation, which describes rarefied gas flows at the mesoscopic, statistical level, is central to the theory of non-equilibrium flows typical of aerothermodynamic and plasma applications. It is fundamental for predicting mesoscopic phenomena in gases when experimental data is limited or not available, in applications ranging from external aerodynamics, chemical reactions, and near vacuum flows to interacting charged transport modeling plasmas and submicroscale devices. We seek to develop accurate computational capabilities for the solution of non-equilibrium flows using models that range from hard spheres and Lennard-Jones style cross sections for neutral gases to the grazing collisions limit of the Landau-Fokker-Plank equation for collisional plasmas. Important issues include the fast evaluation of collision integrals, simulations that account for chemical and electromagnetic interaction of particles, complex geometries, coupling of continuum and non-continuum models, and quantification of numerical error and uncertainty of simulations.