A COMPARISON OF SIMULATION METHODS FOR RAREFIED-GAS FLOWS

Simulation methods like DSMC are efficient tools to compute rarefied g as flows. Using supercomputers it is possible to include various real gas effects Like vibrational energies or chemical reactions in a gas m ixture. Nevertheless it is still necessary to improve the accuracy of the current simulation methods in order to reduce the computational ef fort. To support this task the paper presents a comparison of the clas sical DSMC method with the so-called Finite Pointset Method. This new approach was developed during several years in the framework of the Eu ropean space project HERMES. The comparison given in the paper is base d on two different test cases: a spatially homogeneous relaxation prob lem and a two-dimensional axisymmetric flow problem at high Mach numbe rs. (C) 1995 American Institute of Physics.