Motivation and objectives


At this workshop we want to bring together scientists and engineers who have a common interest in the numerical simulation of dilute systems and whose recent work has included the topics outlined in "scientific background". Despite the diversity, the organizers anticipate significant interactions among the participants since they are the innovators in this community. As such, most of them have worked on several of these topics (the organizers have worked on nearly all of them), in many cases doing the pioneering studies.


There are several objectives that the organizers hope to achieve at this workshop. We want to discuss how simulation work can lead to the development of new hydrodynamic-like theories (with corresponding numerical methods) for large Knudsen number flows, especially for engineering design studies of microscopic flows. We hope to review the progress being made in the study of fluctuations near and past instabilities and debate whether some recent improvment of mesoscopic techniques (such as CBA for DSMC) can be used in order to achive particle simulation of relatively high Reynolds number flows in the next years. By bringing together scientists studying dilute and semi-dense systems of reacting, granular, colloidal, and charged gases, we anticipate triggering a ``gestalt'' experience as these researchers realize the similarities in their problems and, hopefully, discover useful numerical methods that can be adopted from the various disciplines. Finally, the general question of how different algorithms can be effectively combined into hybrids will be the theme of one of the workshop's round-table discussions.


Since most of the participants are experts in a variety of numerical methods (DSMC, molecular dynamics, lattice-based methods, etc.), the organizers hope to stimulate round-table debates on the relative merits and deficiencies of competing algorithms. These discussion will promote a better understanding of the different range of validity, usefulness or potential of development of these methods, which is a goal of the European Science Foundation's SIMU program.




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