Unsteady disturbances in micro Rayleigh-Benard flows using direct simulation Monte Carlo method

摘要

The direct simulation Monte Carlo method is applied in this paper to simulate the micro Rayleigh-Benard convection for the Rayleigh number of 10,159 and the Knudsen number of 0.01 in a time-dependent manner. A monatomic gas is enclosed between two infinite, parallel plates with the bottom plate at a higher temperature. Cases of three different computational domain sizes in the horizontal directions are simulated. Evolutions of the convective flow unsteady disturbances patterns and the wall heat transfer are studied in detail. Three stages of distinct flow characteristics can be identified as the flows develop from an initially uniform state. In the first stage, the heat is transferred mainly by conduction. The onset of the vortical flow structures marks the beginning of the second stage. Significant differences in the flow and the heat transfer characteristics are observed in the third stage of the three simulated flows. It is found that the simulated microflows develop vortex rolls that advect along the plates at uniform speeds, which has not been reported previously.