Comparison between the DSMC and DSBGK Methods

Abstract: Recently, the DSBGK method (note: the original name DS-BGK is changed to DSBGK for simplicity) was proposed based on the BGK equation to reduce the stochastic noise in simulating rarefied gas flows at low velocity, in which the deviation from equilibrium state is small making the traditional DSMC simulation time-consuming due to the dominance of noise in transient results. In both DSMC and DSBGK simulations, the simulated molecules move into and out of cells randomly and frequently. Consequently, the transient information of molecules in each particular cell contains significant noise. The DSMC method uses the transient values of molecular variables to compute the cell's variables (including number density, flow velocity and temperature) and so the stochastic noise in its cell's variables is remarkable particularly in the case of low velocity. In the DSBGK simulation, the increments rather than the transient information of molecular variables are used to update the cell's variables based on the mass, momentum and energy conservation principles of intermolecular collision process. This updating scheme significantly reduces the noise in cell's variables of DSBGK simulations because the molecular variables are updated smoothly by the extrapolation of acceptance-rejection scheme and so their increments contain low noise. The detailed comparisons of algorithms and results between the DSMC and DSBGK methods are given here. Several benchmark problems are simulated to verify the DSBGK method by comparison with the DSMC method as criterion.