Comparison of Molecular Dynamics and Kinetic Modelling of Gas-Surface Interactions

The interaction of a dilute monatomic gas with a solid surface is studied by Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations and by numerical solutions of a recently proposed kinetic model. Following previous investigations, the heat transport between parallel walls and Couette flow have been adopted as test problems. The distribution functions of re-emitted atoms and the accommodation coefficients obtained from the two techniques are compared in different flow conditions. It is shown that the kinetic model predictions are close to MD results