sentences:  Current research areas of the NGPDL include electric propulsion, hypersonic aerothermodynamics, flows involving very small length scales (MEMS devices), and materials processing (jets used in deposition thin films for advanced materials).Due to nonequilibrium effects, these flows cannot always be computed accurately with the macroscopic equations of gas dynamics and plasma physics.Instead, the lab has adopted a microscopic approach in which the atoms/molecules in a gas and the ions/electrons in a plasma are simulated on computationally using a large number of model particles within sophisticated Monte Carlo methods.