Narrow Results

The impetus of the this study is to investigate flow and thermal field in rarefied gas flows inside a trapezoidal micro/nano-cavity using the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) technique. The investigation covers the hydrodynamic properties and thermal behavior of the flow. The selected Knudsen numbers for this study are arranged in the slip and transition regimes. The results show the center of the vortex location moves by variation in the Knudsen numbers. Also, as the Knudsen number increases, the non-dimensional shear stress increases, but the distribution deviates from a symmetrical profile. The cold to hot transfer, which is in contrast with the conventional Fourier law, is observed. We show that the heat transfer is affected by the second derivative of the velocity. By increasing the Knudsen number, the transferred heat through the walls decreases, but the contraction/expansion effects on the temperature in the corner of the cavity become higher.

A detailed study on thermally driven flows through divergent micro/nanochannels is presented. Rarefied gas flow behavior and thermal mass flow rate were investigated with different divergence angles ranging between 0${}^{\circ }$ and 7${}^{\circ }$ at two aspect ratios ($\mathrm{\text{AR}}=L∕H_{\mathrm{\text{in}}}=6,20$) using particle-based direct simulation Monte-Carlo (DSMC) method. We compare our DSMC solutions for normalized thermal mass flow rate with the numerical solution of the Boltzmann–Krook–Walender (BKW) model and Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook (BGK) model and asymptotic theory over a wide range of Knudsen number in the transition regime. The flow field properties including Mach number, pressure, overall temperature and magnitude of shear stress are examined in detail. Based on our analysis, we observed an approximately constant velocity and pressure distribution at a microchannel with a small opening angle. Our results also demonstrate that the heat lines from weakly nonlinear form of Sone constitutive law and DSMC show good agreement at low Knudsen numbers. Moreover, we show that the effect of divergence angle is influential in increasing normalized thermal mass flow rate at early transition regime.