2003/01/01 by Thorsten Pöschel, E. Ben-Naim, P. L. Krapivsky +1 · 4 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Geotechnical and Geomechanical Engineering #Granular flow and fluidized beds #Tunneling and Rock Mechanics #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/b12449
published as Lecture Notes in Physics 624, 65 (2003) · 28 pages, 2 figures, review
openalex publication_date 2003/01/01 · arxiv created 2003/01/14 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Dynamics of inelastic gases are studied within the framework of random collision processes. The corresponding Boltzmann equation with uniform collision rates is solved analytically for gases, impurities, and mixtures. Generally, the energy dissipation leads to a significant departure from the elastic case. Specifically, the velocity distributions have overpopulated high energy tails and different velocity components are correlated. In the freely cooling case, the velocity distribution develops an algebraic high-energy tail, with an exponent that depends sensitively on the dimension and the degree of dissipation. Moments of the velocity distribution exhibit multiscaling asymptotic behavior, and the autocorrelation function decays algebraically with time. In the forced case, the steady state velocity distribution decays exponentially at large velocities. An impurity immersed in a uniform inelastic gas may or may not mimic the behavior of the background, and the departure from the background behavior is characterized by a series of phase transitions.