COMPARISON OF GRID-DEFINITION SCHEMES FOR MONTE-CARLO SIMULATIONS

This paper examines spatial-discretization approaches for the direct s imulation Monte Carlo method for axisymmetric and three-dimensional fl ows. Computations using three schemes, 1) a uniform Cartesian grid, 2) a structured body-fitted grid, and 3) an unstructured tetrahedral gri d, are presented for the hypersonic flow past a blunted cone for two a ngles of attack, The results indicate that the approaches return very similar flowfield and surface results and that these results show fair agreement with available experimental data, Moreover, it will be demo nstrated that the Cartesian scheme is significantly more efficient on a per-particle basis, but yields overall solution times significantly greater than those for the other two algorithms.