Examination of the LBM in simulation of microchannel flow in transitional regime

Gas flows in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) owing to the small size of the systems possess a relatively large Knuden number and usually belong to the slip and transitional flow regimes. This paper employs three schemes, namely the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method, information preservation (IP) method, and the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), to simulation micro-channel flows at three Knudsen numbers (Kn) of 0.0194, 0.194 and 0.388. The present LBM results are in agreement with those given by Nie et al. (2002), whereas they significantly differ from the DSMC (and IP) results as Kn increases. This suggests that the present version of LBM is not feasible to simulate the micro-channel flows in transition regime