An adaptive procedure for the numerical parameters of a particle simulation

In this article, a computational procedure that automatically determines the optimum time step, cell weight and species weights for steady-state multi-species DSMC (direct simulation Monte Carlo) simulations is presented. The time step is required to satisfy the basic requirements of the DSMC method while the weight and relative weights fields are chosen so as to obtain a user-specified average number of particles in all cells of the domain. The procedure allows the conduct of efficient DSMC simulations with minimal user input and is integrable into existing DSMC codes. The adaptive method is used to simulate a test case consisting of two counterflowing jets at a Knudsen number of 0.015. Large accuracy gains for sampled number densities and velocities over a standard simulation approach for the same number of particles are observed.