SUMMARY
Microfluidics is a multidisciplinary area founding applications in several fields such as the aerospace industry. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are mainly adopted for flow control, micropower generation and for life support and environmental control for space applications. Microflows are modeled relying on both a continuum and molecular approach. In this paper, the compressible Navier–Stokes (CNS) equations have been adopted to solve a two-dimensional unsteady flow for a viscous micro shock-channel problem. In microflows context, as for the most gas dynamics applications, the CNS equations are usually discretized in space using finite volume method (FVM). In the present paper, the PDEs are discretized with the nodal discontinuous Galerkin finite element method (DG–FEM) in order to understand how the method performs at microscale level for compressible flows. Validation is performed through a benchmark test problem for microscale applications. The error norms, order of accuracy and computational cost are investigated in a grid refinement study, showing a good agreement and increasing accuracy with reference data as the mesh is refined. The effects of different explicit Runge–Kutta schemes and of different time step sizes have also been studied. We found that the choice of the temporal scheme does not really affect the accuracy of the numerical results.