Modeling of transport phenomena in gases based on quantum scattering

A quantum interatomic scattering is implemented in the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method applied to transport phenomena in rarefied gases. In contrast to the traditional DSMC method based on the classical scattering, the proposed implementation allows us to model flows of gases over the whole temperature range beginning from 1 K up any high temperature when no ionization happens. To illustrate the new numerical approach, two helium isotopes 3He and 4He were considered in two canonical problems, namely, heat transfer between two planar surfaces and planar Couette flow. To solve these problems, the ab initio potential for helium is used, but the proposed technique can be used with any intermolecular potential. The problems were solved over the temperature range from 1 K to 3000 K and for two values of the rarefaction parameter δ=1 and 10. The former corresponds to the transitional regime and the latter describes the temperature jump and velocity slip regime. No influence of the quantum effects was detected within the numerical error of 0.1% for the temperature 300 K and higher. However, the quantum approach requires less computational effort than the classical one in this temperature range. For temperatures lower than 300 K, the influence of the quantum effects exceed the numerical error and reaches 67% at the temperature of 1 K. Numerical data provided in Supplemental Material can be used to model any kind of helium flow at any temperature.