- A. Beskok, W. Trimmer and G. E. Karniadakis, Rarefaction
and Compressibility Effects in
Micro-Flows, Accepted to Journal of Fluids Engineering, expected
date of publication September, 1996.
Gas microflows are encountered in many applications of Micro-Electro-Mechanical
Systems (MEMS).
Computational modeling and simulation can provide an effective predictive capability
for
heat and momentum transfer in microscales as well as means of evaluating
the performance of a new microdevice before hardware fabrication.
In this article we present models and a computational methodology for simulating
gas microflows in the slip-flow
regime for which the Knudsen number is less than 0.3. The formulation is based
on the classical
Maxwell/Smoluchowski boundary conditions that allow partial slip at the wall.
We first modify a high-order slip
boundary condition we developed in previous work so that it can be easily
implemented to
provide enhanced numerical stability.
We also extend a previous formulation for
incompressible flows to include compressibility effects which are primarily
responsible for the nonlinear
pressure distribution in microchannel flows. The focus of the paper is on the
competing effects of
compressibility and rarefaction in internal flows in long channels. Several
simulation results are
presented and comparisons are provided with available experimental data.
A specific set of benchmark experiments is proposed to systematically study
compressibility,
rarefaction and viscous heating in microscales in order to provide validation to
the numerical
models and the slip-flow theory in general as well as to establish absolute
standards in this
relatively young field of fluid mechanics.