Implicit high-order method for calculating rarefied gas flow in a planar microchannel

An efficient numerical algorithm for calculating rarefied gas flows in planar microchannels on the basis of the Boltzmann kinetic equation with the linearized S-model collision integral is presented. The algorithm consists of a high-order spatial discretisation on unstructured meshes, conservative procedure to calculate macroscopic quantities and efficient one-step implicit time evolution method. It therefore works across all flow regimes from the free-molecular to nearly continuum ones and provides rapid convergence to steady state solutions. The parallel implementation is provided via MPI programming paradigm. The performance of the method is illustrated by computing the flow for length to the width ratios for up to 10(3) in the wide range of Knudsen numbers. Numerical estimates of efficiency of implicit time marching and parallel performance as well as convergence studies in both physical and velocity spaces are provided. The end effects and other essentially two-dimensional features of the flow are analysed and a detailed comparison with the case of an infinitely long channel is carried out. The presented numerical data can be used as reference for future studies of nonlinear flows as well as for comparison with other numerical approaches and flow models. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.