Well, perhaps not, and volunteers are difficult to come by, but the general problem of gas being forced through an orifice into a vacuum is extremely important. The question we wish to investigate is: do you need a special nozzle to increase the gas speed to the speed of sound in the throat of the nozzle or will this happen using a simple tube and an appropriate gas flow (as with the fire extinguisher used by Matt Damon in the Martian). We will use Monte Carlo particle-pushing employing multiple CPU cores to investigate this problem. Further extensions will investigate the transition from fluid like flow to “collisionless” molecular flow.

Basic physics or engineering