Flow and Thermal Fields Investigation in Divergent Micro/Nano Channels

TL;DR

This study uses DSMC simulations to analyze nitrogen gas flow and heat transfer in diverging micro and nano-channels, revealing effects of divergence angle on flow acceleration, deceleration, and thermal behavior across different Knudsen regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a computational approach combining DSMC with SBT collision scheme to efficiently study flow and thermal fields in diverging micro/nano-channels, highlighting the impact of divergence angle.

Findings

Flow deceleration with increased divergence angle due to flow expansion.

No flow separation observed due to slip at the wall.

Mass flow rate increases with divergence angle.

Abstract

The present work is related to the study of the nitrogen gas flow through diverging micro and nano-channels. The direct simulation Monte-Carlo (DSMC) method has been used to study the flow. The Simplified Bernoulli Trials (SBT) collision scheme has been employed to reduce the computational costs and required amounts of the computer resources. The effects of various divergence angles on flow and thermal fields have been studied for different Knudsen numbers in late-slip and early-transition regimes. The inlet-to-outlet pressure ratio has been set to 2.5 for micro and nano-channels with a uniform constant wall temperature. By analyzing the numerical results no flow separation has been found due to slip at the wall which is different than flow behavior in continuum regime. The results indicate that the viscous component has a relatively large contribution to the overall pressure drop and flow behavior. It observed that for low divergence angles the effects of pressure forces dominate the effects of shear stress and divergence angle and cause the flow to accelerate along the channel while by increasing the divergence angle and therefore the effects of flow expansion, the flow decelerates along the channel. The mass flow rate through channel increases by increasing the divergence angle. Cold-to-hot heat transfer has been observed in diverging micro and nano-channels. In order to investigate the thermal behavior in diverging micro and nano-channels, the results have been compared to weakly non-linear constitutive laws derived from Boltzmann's equation.