Kinetic modeling of the transient flows of single gases and gaseous mixtures

A gas inside the microsystems or the porous media is in its non-equilibrium state, due to the fact that the molecular mean free path is comparable to the characteristic dimension of the media. The same state of a gas, called rarefied, is found at high altitude or in the vacuum equipment working at low pressure. All these types of flow can be described by the kinetic models derived from the Boltzmann equation. This thesis presents the development of the numerical tools for the modeling and simulations of the rarefied gas flows. The two models of the full Boltzmann equation, the Shakhov model (S-model) for the single gas and the McCormack model for the gas mixture, are considered. The discrete velocity method is used to the numerical discretization in the molecular velocity space and the TVD-like scheme is implemented in the physical space. The main aspect of this work is centered around the transient properties of the gas flows and, especially, on the transient heat and mass transfer behaviors. However, for some configurations only steady-state solutions are considered and the implicit scheme is developed to reduce the computational cost. Using the proposed numerical approach several types of the transient rarefied single gas flows as well as the binary mixture of the monoatomic gases are studied.