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This paper is devoted to the application of the method of numerical solution of the Boltzmann equation for the solution of the problem of modeling the behavior of radionuclides in the cavity of the interelectric gap of a multielement electrogenerating channel. The analysis of gas-kinetic processes of thermionic converters is important for proving the design of the power-generating channel. The paper reviews two constructive schemes of the channel: with one- and two-way withdrawal of gaseous fission products into a vacuum-cesium system. The analysis uses a two-dimensional transport equation of the second-order accuracy for the solution of the left-hand side and the projection method for solving the right-hand side — the collision integral. In the course of the work, a software package was implemented that makes it possible to calculate on the cluster architecture by using the algorithm of parallelizing the left-hand side of the equation; the paper contains the results of the analysis of the dependence of the calculation efficiency on the number of parallel nodes. The paper contains calculations of data on the distribution of pressures of gaseous fission products in the gap cavity, calculations use various sets of initial pressures and flows; the dependency of the radionuclide pressure in the collector region was determined as a function of cesium pressures at the ends of the gap. The tests in the loop channel of a nuclear reactor confirm the obtained results.

In this paper, the structure of a shock wave in a binary gas mixture is studied on the basis of direct solution of the Boltzmann kinetic equation. The conservative projection method is used to evaluate the collision integral in the kinetic equation. The applied evaluation formulas and numerical methods are described in detail. The model of hard spheres is used as an interaction potential of molecules. Numerical simulation is performed using the developed simulation environment software, which makes it possible to study both steady and non-steady flows of gas mixtures in various flow regimes and for an arbitrary geometry of the problem. Modeling is performed on a cluster architecture. Due to the use of code parallelization technologies, a significant acceleration of computations is achieved. With a fixed accuracy controlled by the simulation parameters, the distributions of macroscopic characteristics of the mixture components through the shock wave front were obtained. Computations were conducted for various ratios of molecular masses and Mach numbers. The total accuracy of at least 1% for the local values of molecular density and temperature and 3% for the shock front width was achieved. The obtained results were compared with existing computation data. The results presented in this paper are of theoretical significance, and can serve as a test computation, since they are obtained using the exact Boltzmann equation.

The purpose of this work is to develop a universal computer program (solver) which solves kinetic Boltzmann equation for simulations of rarefied gas flows in complexly shaped devices. The structure of the solver is described in details. Its efficiency is demonstrated on an example of calculations of a modern many tubes Knudsen pump. The kinetic Boltzmann equation is solved by finite-difference method on discrete grid in spatial and velocity spaces. The differential advection operator is approximated by finite difference method. The calculation of the collision integral is based on the conservative projection method.

In the developed computational program the unstructured spatial mesh is generated using GMSH and may include prisms, tetrahedrons, hexahedrons and pyramids. The mesh is denser in areas of flow with large gradients of gas parameters. A three-dimensional velocity grid consists of cubic cells of equal volume.

A huge amount of calculations requires effective parallelization of the algorithm which is implemented in the program with the use of Message Passing Interface (MPI) technology. An information transfer from one node to another is implemented as a kind of boundary condition. As a result, every MPI node contains the information about only its part of the grid.

The main result of the work is presented in the graph of pressure difference in 2 reservoirs connected by a multitube Knudsen pump from Knudsen number. This characteristic of the Knudsen pump obtained by numerical methods shows the quality of the pump. Distributions of pressure, temperature and gas concentration in a steady state inside the pump and the reservoirs are presented as well.

The correctness of the solver is checked using two special test solutions of more simple boundary problems — test with temperature distribution between 2 planes with different temperatures and test with conservation of total gas mass.

The correctness of the obtained data for multitube Knudsen pump is checked using denser spatial and velocity grids, using more collisions in collision integral per time step.

The paper simulates a mixture of gases in a multi-stage micro-pump and evaluates its effectiveness at separating the components of the mixture. A device in the form of a long channel with a series of transverse plates is considered. A temperature difference between the sides of the plates induces a radiometric gas flow within the device, and the differences in masses of the gases lead to differences in flow velocities and to the separation of the mixture. Modeling is based on the numerical solution of the Boltzmann kinetic equation, for which a splitting scheme is used, i. e., the advection equation and the relaxation problem are solved separately in alternation. The calculation of the collision integral is performed using the conservative projection method. This method ensures the strict fulfillment of the laws of conservation of mass, momentum, and energy, as well as the important asymptotic property of the equality of the integral of the Maxwell function to zero. Explicit first-order and second-order TVD-schemes are used to solve the advection equation. The calculations were performed for a neon-argon mixture using a model of solid spheres with real molecular diameters and masses. Software has been developed to allow calculations on personal computers and cluster systems. The use of parallelization leads to faster computation and constant time per iteration for devices of different sizes, enabling the modeling of large particle systems. It was found that the value of mixture separation, i. e. the ratio of densities at the ends of the device linearly depends on the number of cascades in the device, which makes it possible to estimate separation for multicascade systems, computer modeling of which is impossible. Flows and distributions of gas inside the device during its operation were analyzed. It was demonstrated that devices of this kind with a sufficiently large number of plates are suitable for the separation of gas mixtures, given that they have no moving parts and are quite simple in manufacture and less subject to wear.

The work investigates the process of self-consistent relaxation of the region of disturbances created in a rarefied binary low-temperature plasma by a stationary charged ball or cylinder with an absorbing surface. A feature of such problems is their self-consistent kinetic nature, in which it is impossible to separate the processes of transfer in phase space and the formation of an electromagnetic field. A mathematical model is presented that makes it possible to describe and analyze the state of the gas, electric and thermal fields in the vicinity of the body. The multidimensionality of the kinetic formulation creates certain problems in the numerical solution, therefore a curvilinear system of nonholonomic coordinates was selected for the problem, which minimizes its phase space, which contributes to increasing the efficiency of numerical methods. For such coordinates, the form of the Vlasov kinetic equation has been justified and analyzed. To solve it, a variant of the large particle method with a constant form factor was used. The calculations used a moving grid that tracks the displacement of the distribution function carrier in the phase space, which further reduced the volume of the controlled region of the phase space. Key details of the model and numerical method are revealed. The model and the method are implemented as code in the Matlab language. Using the example of solving a problem for a ball, the presence of significant disequilibrium and anisotropy in the particle velocity distribution in the disturbed zone is shown. Based on the calculation results, pictures of the evolution of the structure of the particle distribution function, profiles of the main macroscopic characteristics of the gas — concentration, current, temperature and heat flow, and characteristics of the electric field in the disturbed region are presented. The mechanism of heating of attracted particles in the disturbed zone is established and some important features of the process of formation of heat flow are shown. The results obtained are well explainable from a physical point of view, which confirms the adequacy of the model and the correct operation of the software tool. The creation and testing of a basis for the development in the future of tools for solving more complex problems of modeling the behavior of ionized gases near charged bodies is noted.

The work will be useful to specialists in the field of mathematical modeling, heat and mass transfer processes, lowtemperature plasma physics, postgraduate students and senior students specializing in the indicated areas.

The paper considers the process of flow formation in an outflow of a binary gas mixture through a thin slit into vacuum. An approach to modeling the flows of rarefied gas mixtures in the transient regime is proposed based on the direct solution of the Boltzmann kinetic equation, in which the conservative projection method is used to calculate the collision integrals. Calculation formulas are provided; the calculation procedure is described in detail in relation to the flow of a binary gas mixture. The Lennard–Jones potential is used as an interaction potential of molecules. A software modeling environment has been developed that makes it possible to study the flows of gas mixtures in a transitional regime on systems of cluster architecture. Due to the use of code parallelization technologies, an acceleration of calculations by 50–100 times was obtained. Numerical simulation of a two-dimensional outflow of a binary argon-neon gas mixture from a vessel into vacuum through a thin slit is carried out for various values of the Knudsen number. The graphs of the dependence of gas mixture components output flow on time in the process of establishing the flow are obtained. Non-stationary regions of strong separation of gas mixture components, in which the molecular densities ratio reaches 10 or more, were discovered. The discovered effect can have applications in the problem of gas mixtures separation.

The paper presents a physical and numerical analysis of the dynamics and radiation of explosion products formed during the Russian-American experiment in the ionosphere using an explosive generator based on hexogen (RDX) and trinitrotoluene (TNT). The main attention is paid to the radiation of the perturbed region and the dynamics of the products of explosion (PE). The detailed chemical composition of the explosion products is analyzed and the initial concentrations of the most important molecules capable of emitting in the infrared range of the spectrum are determined, and their radiative constants are given. The initial temperature of the explosion products and the adiabatic exponent are determined. The nature of the interpenetration of atoms and molecules of a highly rarefied ionosphere into a spherically expanding cloud of products is analyzed. An approximate mathematical model of the dynamics of explosion products under conditions of mixing rarefied ionospheric air with them has been developed and the main thermodynamic characteristics of the system have been calculated. It is shown that for a time of 0,3–3 sec there is a significant increase in the temperature of the scattering mixture as a result of its deceleration. In the problem under consideration the explosion products and the background gas are separated by a contact boundary. To solve this two-region gas dynamic problem a numerical algorithm based on the Lagrangian approach was developed. It was necessary to fulfill special conditions at the contact boundary during its movement in a stationary gas. In this case there are certain difficulties in describing the parameters of the explosion products near the contact boundary which is associated with a large difference in the size of the mass cells of the explosion products and the background due to a density difference of 13 orders of magnitude. To reduce the calculation time of this problem an irregular calculation grid was used in the area of explosion products. Calculations were performed with different adiabatic exponents. The most important result is temperature. It is in good agreement with the results obtained by the method that approximately takes into account interpenetration. The time behavior of the IR emission coefficients of active molecules in a wide range of the spectrum is obtained. This behavior is qualitatively consistent with experiments for the IR glow of flying explosion products.