DSMC simulation of hypersonic flows using an improved SBT-TAS technique

The current paper examines a new DSMC approach to hypersonic flow simulation consisting of a combination between the Simplified Bernoulli Trials (SBT) collision algorithm and the transient adaptive subcell (TAS) selection procedure. The SBT collision algorithm has already been introduced as a scheme that provides accurate results with a quite small number of particles per cells and its combination with the transient adaptive subcell (TAS) technique will enable SBT to have coarser grid sizes as well. In the current research, the no-time-counter (NTC) collision algorithm and nearest neighbor (NN) pair selection procedure of Bird DS2V code are substituted by the SBT-TAS and comparisons between the new algorithm and NTC-NN are made considering appropriate test cases including hypersonic cylinder flow and axisymmetric biconic flow. Hypersonic cylinder flow is a well-known benchmark problem with a wide collision frequency range while the biconic flow exhibits laminar shock/shock and shock/boundary-layer interactions. Improvements implemented in the SBT-TAS technique, including subcell volume estimation, surface properties filter, and time controller, are discussed in detail. The simulations of these hypersonic test cases demonstrated that from the viewpoint of consumed sample-size, SBT-TAS is an efficient collision technique.