The focus of this research is to delineate the thermal behavior of a rarefied monatomic gas confined between horizontal hot and cold walls, physically known as rarefied Rayleigh-Bénard (RB) convection. Convection in a rarefied gas appears only for high temperature differences between the horizontal boundaries, where nonlinear distributions of temperature and density make it different from the classical RB problem. Numerical simulations adopting the direct simulation Monte Carlo approach are performed to study the rarefied RB problem for a cold to hot wall temperature ratio equal to $r=0.1$ and different rarefaction conditions. Rarefaction is quantified by the Knudsen number, Kn. To investigate the long-time thermal behavior of the system two ways are followed to measure the heat transfer: (i) measurements of macroscopic hydrodynamic variables in the bulk of the flow and (ii) measurements at the microscopic scale based on the molecular evaluation of the energy exchange between the isothermal wall and the fluid. The measurements based on the bulk and molecular scales agreed well. Hence, both approaches are considered in evaluations of the heat transfer in terms of the Nusselt number, Nu. To characterize the flow properly, a modified Rayleigh number (${\mathrm{Ra}}_m$) is defined to take into account the nonlinear temperature and density distributions at the pure conduction state. Then the limits of instability, indicating the transition of the conduction state into a convection state, at the low and large Froude asymptotes are determined based on ${\mathrm{Ra}}_m$. At the large Froude asymptote, simulations following the onset of convection showed a relatively small range for the critical Rayleigh (${\mathrm{Ra}}_m=1770\pm 15$) that flow instability occurs at each investigated rarefaction degree. Moreover, we measured the maximum Nusselt values ${\mathrm{Nu}}_{\max }$ at each investigated Kn. It was observed that for $\mathrm{Kn}\ge 0.02, {\mathrm{Nu}}_{\max }$ decreases linearly until the transition to conduction at $\mathrm{Kn}\approx 0.03$, known as the rarefaction limit for $r=0.1$, occurs. At the low Froude (parametric) asymptote, the emergence of a highly stratified flow is the prime suspect of the transition to conduction. The critical ${\mathrm{Ra}}_m$ in which this transition occurs is then determined at each Kn. The comparison of this critical Rayleigh versus Kn also shows a linear decrease from ${\mathrm{Ra}}_m\approx 7400$ at $\mathrm{Kn}=0.02$ to ${\mathrm{Ra}}_m\approx 1770$ at $\mathrm{Kn}\approx 0.03$.

• Received 1 December 2019
• Accepted 24 June 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.013102