This current and comprehensive book provides an updated treatment of molecular gas dynamics topics for aerospace engineers, or anyone researching high-temperature gas flows for hypersonic vehicles and propulsion systems. It demonstrates how the areas of quantum mechanics, kinetic theory, and statistical mechanics can combine in order to facilitate the study of nonequilibrium processes of internal energy relaxation and chemistry. All of these theoretical ideas are used to explain the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method, a numerical technique based on molecular simulation. Because this text provides comprehensive coverage of the physical models available for use in the DSMC method, in addition to the equations and algorithms required to implement the DSMC numerical method, readers will learn to solve nonequilibrium flow problems and perform computer simulations, and obtain a more complete understanding of various physical modeling options for DSMC than is available in other texts.

The aim of this book is to present the concepts, methods and applications of kinetic theory to rarefied gas dynamics. After introducing the basic tools, problems in plane geometry are treated using approximation techniques (perturbation and numerical methods). These same techniques are later used to deal with two- and three-dimensional problems. The models include not only monatomic but also polyatomic gases, mixtures, chemical reactions. A special chapter is devoted to evaporation and condensation phenomena. Each section is accompanied by problems which are mainly intended to demonstrate the use of the material in the text and to outline additional subjects, results and equations. This will help ensure that the book can be used for a range of graduate courses in aerospace engineering or applied mathematics.

This book is devoted to analysis of Monte Carlo methods developed in rarefied gas dynamics. Presented is the short history of the development of such methods, described are their main properties, their advantages and deficiencies. It is shown that the contemporary stage in the progress of computational methods cannot be regarded without a complex approach to the preparation of algorithms taking into account all the peculiarities of the problem under consideration, that is, of the physical nature of a process, the mathematical model and the theoretical aspects of computational mathematics and stochastic processes. Thoroughly investigated is the possibility of application of Monte Carlo methods in some kindred areas of science which are non-traditional for the use of statistical modeling (continuous media, turbulence). Considered are the possible directions of development of statistical modeling.

This book highlights a comprehensive description of the numerical methods in rarefied gas dynamics, which has strong applications ranging from space vehicle re-entry, micro-electromechanical systems, to shale gas extraction. The book consists of five major parts: The fast spectral method to solve the Boltzmann collision operator for dilute monatomic gas and the Enskog collision operator for dense granular gas; The general synthetic iterative scheme to solve the kinetic equations with the properties of fast convergence and asymptotic preserving; The kinetic modeling of monatomic and molecular gases, and the extraction of critical gas parameters from the experiment of Rayleigh-Brillouin scattering; The assessment of the fluid-dynamics equations derived from the Boltzmann equation and typical kinetic gas-surface boundary conditions; The applications of the fast spectral method and general synthetic iterative scheme to reveal the dynamics in some canonical rarefied gas flows. The book is suitable for postgraduates and researchers interested in rarefied gas dynamics and provides many numerical codes for them to begin with.

This volume contains the proceedings of a workshop which was held in Brussels during the month of August 1989. A strong motivation for organizing this workshop was to bring together people who have been involved in the microscopic simulation of phenomena occuring on "large" space and time scales. Indeed, results obtained in the last years by different groups tend to support the idea that macroscopic behavior already appears in systems small enough so as to be modelled by a collection of interacting particles on a (super) computer. Such an approach is certainly desirable to study situations where no satisfactory phenomenological theory is known to hold, or where solutions of the equations are too hard to obtain numerically. It is also interesting from a more fundamental point of view, namely the investigation of the limits of validity of the macroscopic description itself. The main technique used in bridging the gap between the macro and micro worlds has been the molecular dynamics simulations, that is the numerical solution of the equations of motion of the model particles which constitute the system under study, a gas, a liquid or even a solid. However, this technique is by no means the only one.