The research group of Professor Boyd is active in the development and application of physical models and numerical methods for simulation of nonequilibrium gas flows and plasmas. Current application areas include electric propulsion (small rockets used to control spacecraft), hypersonic aerothermodynamics (flight of spacecraft at high speeds), flows involving very small length scales (MEMS devices), and materials processing (jets used in deposition thin films for advanced materials). Due to nonequilibrium effects, these flows cannot always be computed accurately with the macroscopic equations of gas dynamics and plasma physics. Instead, we adopt a microscopic approach in which the atoms/molecules in a gas and the ions/electrons in a plasma are simulated on the computer using a large number of model particles using sophisticated Monte Carlo methods. The group has developed a general 2D/axi-symmetric/3D code, MONACO, for simulating nonequilibrium neutral flows that can run either on scalar workstations or in a parallel computing environment.
The group also has developed a general 2D/axi-symmetic/3Dcode, LeMANS, to numerically solve the Navier-Stokes equations when the Knudsen number is sufficently small. This allows group members to explore flows that would otherwise be too computationally expensive with a particle method. Work is currently being done to combine the two codes into a hybrid that uses MONACO when the flow is in the collisional nonequilibrium regime and LeMANS when the flow can be considered continuous.
Our research in nonequilibrium gases and plasmas involves development of physical models for the gas systems of interest, development of numerical algorithms on the latest supercomputers, and application to challenging flows in several exciting projects. We place a great deal of emphasis on comparison of our calculations with external experimental and theoretical results, and have ongoing collaborative studies with colleagues at the University of Michigan, other universities, and government laboratories.