Numerical Analysis of Rarefied Gas Flows Induced by Rotor-Stator Blades

Abstract The unsteady gas flow in the two-dimensional model of the turbo-molecular pump is analyzed using the Boltzmann and BGK equations. The deterministic solver enables the visualization of instantaneous behavior in the time-periodic state induced by the rotor-stator system. A more straightforward explanation of the driving mechanism of the turbo-molecular pump is proposed, which leads to the alternative design of the pump. The combination of the traveling finite volume and the spherically designed grid enables the simulation of the full Boltzmann equation to be carried out by a personal computer.