Extending a Hybrid Continuum-Molecular Simulation Method to Solve the Micro/Nanoscale Gas Mixing Problems

Despite vast efforts in developing hybrid continuum-molecular methods, there has been no specific work focused on the gas mixture flow simulations including the mixing and/or separation of species. In present study, we extend a hybrid method to analyze such phenomena suitably and study the gas mixing problems in micro/nano length scales reliably. The results of current hybrid simulations are compared against the results of full-molecular simulations to evaluate the physical accuracy of developed hybrid method. The effect of continuum breakdown criterion is investigated to find out the achieved accuracy of developed hybrid simulation method from different perspectives. The current results indicate that using a reasonable breakdown parameter can result in very good physical accuracy. The results also indicate that using the hybrid simulation can be quite effective to avoid the statistical fluctuations, which are inherent to the molecular simulation methods.