A Collective Collision Operator for DSMC

A new scheme to simulate elastic collisions in particle simulation codes is presented. The new scheme aims at simulating the collisions in the highly collisional regime, in which particle simulation techniques typically become computationally expensive.The new scheme is based on the concept of a grid-based collision field. According to this scheme, the particles perform a single collision with the background grid during a time step. The properties of the background field are calculated from the moments of the distribution function accumulated on the grid. The collision operator is based on the Langevin equation. Based on comparisons with other methods, it is found that the Langevin method overestimates the collision frequency for dilute gases