Direct Simulation Monte Carlo

Abstract

The direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method was created by Graeme Bird, a professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Sydney, Australia. The first publication, appearing in Physics of Fluids in 1963, demonstrated the DSMC method as an alternative to molecular dynamics (MD) for a hard-sphere gas (Bird 1963). Since that time, Bird has written two textbooks on the DSMC method (Bird 1994, 2013) and an entire field of research has emerged with hundreds of publications on the DSMC method and its application to scientific and engineering problems. The DSMC method has become a powerful and widespread technique for the simulation of nonequilibrium gases where the molecular nature of the gas must be accounted for.