A COMPARISON OF SIMULATION METHODS FOR RAREFIED-GAS FLOWS

Simulation methods like DSMC are efficient tools to compute rarefied gas flows. Using supercomputers it is possible to include various real gas effects Like vibrational energies or chemical reactions in a gas mixture. Nevertheless it is still necessary to improve the accuracy of the current simulation methods in order to reduce the computational effort. To support this task the paper presents a comparison of the classical DSMC method with the so-called Finite Pointset Method. This new approach was developed during several years in the framework of the European space project HERMES. The comparison given in the paper is based on two different test cases: a spatially homogeneous relaxation problem and a two-dimensional axisymmetric flow problem at high Mach numbers. (C) 1995 American Institute of Physics.