Numerical Simulation of Microflows using Hermite Spectral Methods

Abstract: We propose a Hermite spectral method for the spatially inhomogeneous Boltzmann equation. For the inverse-power-law model, we generalize an approximate quadratic collision operator defined in the normalized and dimensionless setting to an operator for arbitrary distribution functions. An efficient algorithm with a fast transform is introduced to discretize this new collision operator. The method is tested for one-dimensional benchmark microflow problems.