Review of Ongoing Developments for Dynamics Simulations of Thermophoretic Problems

In the frame of a cooperation between the MEEO (Meteorological and Environment Earth Observation) and the Mathematics Department of the University of Ferrara, Italy, a research has been initiated aiming at developing, testing and applying a computational program, called THERCONF, dedicated to numerical simulations of thermophoretic problems. The program is based on the application of the fundamental laws of molecular dynamics, combined with the statistical methods of the DSMC (Direct Simulation Monte Carlo). The computer program can be applied to a variety of problems, involving thermal creep induced by temperature gradients along heated walls, thermophoretic displacement of aerosol particles in the environment of the upper Earth atmosphere, thermophoretic confinement of cosmic dust particles, migration of fuel debris in nuclear reactor under hypothetical accident conditions. The development work of the code involves both modeling physical details of molecular collisions and improving the performances from the viewpoint of computational efficiency. The latter involves an ongoing effort in establishing a parallel version of the code. The article reviews the most important characteristics of the code from the physical and computational viewpoints and summarizes ongoing research on code validation and application