Prescribed Wall-Heat-Flux Control of Blockage and Impulse in a Rarefied Micro-Nozzle

Abstract

Prescribed wall heat flux provides an active route for controlling rarefied micro-nozzle flows, but its effect is governed by the coupled wall--bulk thermal response rather than by the imposed flux alone. This work uses direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) simulations to study nitrogen flow in a converging--diverging micro-nozzle with cooling, adiabatic, and heating applied on the diverging wall. The imposed heat flux is scaled by the inlet kinetic-energy flux, $E=0.5ρ_i U_i^3$, giving $Q_w/E$ from $-10.5\%$ to $97.3\%$; this range spans moderate cooling, weak-to-intermediate heating, and a near-unity thermal-forcing regime. Wall and mass-flux-weighted bulk temperature profiles, film-temperature-based Nusselt and local-viscosity Brinkman-type diagnostics, gradient-length Knudsen indicators, mass-flux thickness, thrust decomposition, and proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) of signed numerical schlieren are analyzed. The results show that heating creates strong wall--bulk stratification: the wall temperature exceeds five times the inlet value, while the bulk temperature responds more gradually. Cooling cases contain locations where $T_w-T_b$ changes sign, making the local Nusselt-type response singular; the raw singular behavior is retained for diagnosis and a validity mask is used only for comparative plotting. Heating contracts the effective mass-carrying core, increasing aerodynamic blockage and reducing mass flow rate. However, strong heating increases the specific impulse from $156$ s to $201$ s because thermal and pressure-thrust augmentation outweigh the mass-flow penalty. The internal compression feature evolves into a finite viscous--thermal compression zone, and its heat-flux-parametric response remains low-dimensional, with the first two POD modes capturing more than $97\%$ of the fluctuation energy.