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Inversion of the transverse force on a spinning sphere moving in a rarefied gas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2021

Satoshi Taguchi*
Affiliation:
Department of Advanced Mathematical Sciences, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan Research Project of Fluid Science and Engineering, Advanced Engineering Research Center, Kyoto University, Japan
Tetsuro Tsuji
Affiliation:
Department of Advanced Mathematical Sciences, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan Research Project of Fluid Science and Engineering, Advanced Engineering Research Center, Kyoto University, Japan
*
Email address for correspondence: taguchi.satoshi.5a@kyoto-u.ac.jp

Abstract

The flow around a spinning sphere moving in a rarefied gas is considered in the following situation: (i) the translational velocity of the sphere is small (i.e. the Mach number is small); (ii) the Knudsen number, the ratio of the molecular mean free path to the sphere radius, is of the order of unity (the case with small Knudsen numbers is also discussed); and (iii) the ratio between the equatorial surface velocity and the translational velocity of the sphere is of the order of unity. The behaviour of the gas, particularly the transverse force acting on the sphere, is investigated through an asymptotic analysis of the Boltzmann equation for small Mach numbers. It is shown that the transverse force is expressed as $\boldsymbol{F}_L = {\rm \pi}\rho a^3 (\boldsymbol{\varOmega} \times \boldsymbol{v}) \bar{h}_L$, where $\rho$ is the density of the surrounding gas, a is the radius of the sphere, $\boldsymbol {\varOmega }$ is its angular velocity, $\boldsymbol {v}$ is its velocity and $\bar {h}_L$ is a numerical factor that depends on the Knudsen number. Then, $\bar {h}_L$ is obtained numerically based on the Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook model of the Boltzmann equation for a wide range of Knudsen number. It is shown that $\bar {h}_L$ varies with the Knudsen number monotonically from 1 (the continuum limit) to $-\tfrac {2}{3}$ (the free molecular limit), vanishing at an intermediate Knudsen number. The present analysis is intended to clarify the transition of the transverse force, which is previously known to have different signs in the continuum and the free molecular limits.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. Problem.

Figure 1

Table 1. Functions appearing in the similarity solutions.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Schematic of the solution structure. The gas region is divided into two, the inner region $1 < r \ll \varepsilon ^{-1}$ and the outer region $1 \ll r < \infty$, overlapping each other in the crossover region $1 \ll r \ll \varepsilon ^{-1}$.

Figure 3

Table 2. The numerical values of $\gamma _i$ for a hard-sphere gas (Sone 2002, 2007). The values for the BGK model are also shown.

Figure 4

Table 3. Values of $h_D$ for various $k$ for a hard-sphere gas (HS) (Takata et al.1993) and for the BGK model (Taguchi & Suzuki 2017) under the diffuse refection boundary condition. Here $k=\infty$ shows the value of $h_D$ in the free molecular limit ($h_D(\infty )=2\sqrt {{\rm \pi} }({\rm \pi} +8)/3$). For the BGK model, the values of $h_D$ for $k<0.1$ and $k>10$ have been newly obtained in this study.

Figure 5

Table 4. Values of $-h_M$ for various $k$ for the BGK model under the diffuse refection boundary condition (Taguchi et al.2019). Here $k=\infty$ shows the value of $-h_M$ in the free molecular limit ($h_M(\infty )=-8\sqrt {{\rm \pi} }/3$). The values of $h_M$ for $k<0.1$ and $k>10$ have been newly obtained in this study.

Figure 6

Figure 3. Plot of $h_L$ versus $k$ for the BGK model under the diffuse reflection boundary condition. The circle symbols represent the numerical results. The asymptotic formula (3.89b) with $k_0=-1.01619$ (see (3.90)) is shown by the dashed curve. The asymptotic values at $k \to 0$ (the continuum limit) and $k \to \infty$ (the free molecular limit) are shown by the solid and dash-dotted lines, respectively. The value of $h_L$ decreases with $k$ and intersects $h_L=0$ at $k = k_{th} \approx 0.710$.

Figure 7

Table 5. Values of $h_L$ for various $k$ for the BGK model under the diffuse refection boundary condition. Note that $h_L\to -\tfrac {4}{3}{\rm \pi} \approx -4.1888$ as $k\to \infty$. $^{a}$The results obtained by using the asymptotic formula (3.89b).

Figure 8

Figure 4. Coefficients (a) $C_D$, (b) $C_L$ and (c) $C_T$ as a function of $\textit {Kn}$ in the case of $L \varOmega _0/(2RT_0)^{1/2} = 0.1$. The solid lines represent (4.14) using the data of $h_D$, $h_L$ and $h_M$ for the BGK model. The symbols show the results of the DSMC computations for a hard-sphere gas (Volkov 2011). The results for $C_D$ based on the linearized Boltzmann equation for a hard-sphere gas (Takata et al.1993) (i.e. (4.14a) using the data of $h_D$ for hard-sphere gas in table 3) are also shown in (a).