A Continuous Stochastic Model for Non-Equilibrium Dense Gases

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient Fokker-Planck based approximation for simulating dense gas flows far from equilibrium, reducing computational costs while maintaining accuracy in modeling dense gas effects.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel Fokker-Planck approximation for the Enskog equation that efficiently captures dense gas effects and is validated against benchmark simulations.

Findings

Good agreement with benchmark results for flow fields

Accurate modeling of pressure, stress, and heat flux

Significant reduction in computational cost

Abstract

While accurate simulations of dense gas flows far from the equilibrium can be achieved by Direct Simulation adapted to the Enskog equation, the significant computational demand required for collisions appears as a major constraint. In order to cope with that, an efficient yet accurate solution algorithm based on the Fokker-Planck approximation of the Enskog equation is devised in this paper; the approximation is very much associated with the Fokker-Planck model derived from the Boltzmann equation [J. Comput. Phys., 229, 1077 (2010)]-[J. Fluid Mech., 680, 574 (2011)]. The idea behind these Fokker-Planck descriptions is to project the dynamics of discrete collisions implied by the molecular encounters into a set of continuous Markovian processes subject to the drift and diffusion. Thereby, the evolution of particles representing the governing stochastic process becomes independent from each-other and thus very efficient numerical schemes can be constructed. By close inspection of the Enskog operator, it is observed that the dense gas effects contribute further to the advection of molecular quantities. That motivates a modelling approach where the dense gas corrections can be cast in the extra advection of particles. Therefore, the corresponding Fokker-Planck approximation is derived such that the evolution in the physical space accounts for the dense effects present in the pressure, stress tensor and heat fluxes. Hence the consistency between the devised Fokker-Planck approximation and the Enskog operator is shown for the velocity moments up to the heat fluxes. For validation studies, a homogeneous gas inside a box besides Fourier, Couette and lid-driven cavity flow setups are considered. The results based on the Fokker-Planck model are compared with respect to benchmark simulations, where good agreements are found for the flow field along with the transport properties.