Numerical Investigation of Gas Temperature and Velocity at Converging Micro-sensor Under the Influence of Thermal Creeping

In recent years, research on metal oxide gas micro-sensors has been rapidly developed. These sensors are small in size, low cost in fabrication and consume little power. The purpose of the current study is to numerically investigate converge micro-channel on gas inlet temperature under the influence of thermal creeping. The governing nonlinear differential equations, mass, momentum, energy, and species, are coupled and solved by a commercial code. Since the Knudsen number is between 0.01 and 0.1, the slip boundary condition, Maxwell equation, is utilized. The result shows that flow velocity and temperature increases from the micro-channel inlet to the heat source and decreases from the heat source to the micro-channel outlet. Also as the inlet height and convergence increases, at the first flow velocity increases then decreases. This trend for temperature is reverse of the trend for flow velocity.