On the Test Particle Monte-Carlo method to solve the steady state Boltzmann equation, the congruity of its results with experiments and its potential for shared memory parallelism

Abstract The Test Particle Monte Carlo is a known method to solve the steady state Boltzmann particle transport equation in rarefied gas systems. A description of the Test Particle Monte-Carlo procedure is outlined and the accuracy of this method is investigated by analyzing its consistency to experimental data of steady state effusions in isothermal systems. Computational results present deviations from the experiments that are at most 6.7%. After which, this paper investigates the potential of this method when it is parallelized using multi-core CPUs with shared memory for large Knudsen numbers. Scalability is expected since the method relies on a mean particle field that renders particle trajectories nearly independent from one another, therefore reducing data communication between processing cores. The mean particle distribution field helps linearize the collision term of the Boltzmann equation. Shared Memory Parallelism is an interesting feature when combined with distributed memory parallelism for design optimization of vacuum systems.