Monte Carlo solution of the Boltzmann equation via a discrete velocity model

A new discrete velocity scheme for solving the Boltzmann equation is described. Directly solving the Boltzmann equation is computationally expensive because, in addition to working in physical space, the nonlinear collision integral must also be evaluated in a velocity space. Collisions between each point in velocity space with all other points in velocity space must be considered in order to compute the collision integral most accurately, but this is expensive. The computational costs in the present method are reduced by randomly sampling a set of collision partners for each point in velocity space analogous to the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. The present method has been applied to a traveling 1D shock wave. The jump conditions across the shock wave match the Rankine-Hugoniot jump conditions. The internal shock wave structure was compared to DSMC solutions, and good agreement was found for Mach numbers ranging from 1.2 to 10. Since a coarse velocity discretization is required for efficient calculation, the effects of different velocity grid resolutions are examined. Additionally, the new scheme's performance is compared to DSMC and it was found that upstream of the shock wave the new scheme performed nearly an order of magnitude faster than DSMC for the same upstream noise. The noise levels are comparable for the same computational effort downstream of the shock wave. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.