Searching for a near neighbor particle in DSMC cells using pseudo-subcells

LeBeau et al. (2003) [4] introduced the ‘virtual-subcell’ (VSC) method of finding a collision partner for a given DSMC particle in a cell; all potential collision partners in the cell are examined to find the nearest neighbor, which becomes the collision partner. Here I propose a modification of the VSC method, the ‘pseudo-subcell’ (PSC) method, whereby the search for a collision partner stops whenever a ‘near-enough’ particle is found, i.e. whenever another particle is found within the ‘pseudo-subcell’ of radius δ centered on the first particle. The radius of the pseudo-subcell is given by δ = Fd_n, where d_n is the expected distance to the nearest neighbor and F is a constant which can be adjusted to give a desired trade-off between CPU time and accuracy as measured by a small mean collision separation (MCS). For 3D orthogonal cells, of various aspect ratios, d_n/L ≈ 0.746/N^0.383 where N is the number of particles in the cell and L is the cube root of the cell volume. There is a good chance that a particle will be found in the pseudo-subcell and there is a good chance that such a particle is in fact the nearest neighbor. If no particle is found within the pseudo-subcell the closest particle becomes the collision partner.