A comparative numerical study between dissipative particle dynamics and smoothed particle hydrodynamics when applied to simple unsteady flows in microfluidics

Laminar flows through channels, pipes and between two coaxial cylinders are of significant practical interest because they often appear in a wide range of industrial, environmental, and biological processes. Discrete particle modeling has increasingly been used in recent years and in this study we examined two of these methods: dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) and smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method when applied to (a) time-dependent, plane Poiseuille flow and (b) flow between two coaxial cylinders at low Reynolds numbers. The two examples presented in this paper give insight into different features of the two discrete particle methods. It was found that both methods give results with high accuracy, but CPU time is much larger (of order 10(2)-10(3) in the second example) for DPD than for SPH model. This difference is due to the fact that the number of time steps for the DPD model is much greater than for the SPH model (since thermal fluctuations are taken into account in the DPD model).