Driven granular gases with gravity

Abstract

We study fluidized granular gases in a stationary state determined by the balance between an external driving and the bulk dissipation. The two considered situations are inspired by recent experiments, where the gravity plays a major role as a driving mechanism: in the first case gravity acts only in one direction and the bottom wall is vibrated, in the second case gravity acts in both directions and no vibrating walls are present. Simulations performed under the molecular chaos assumption show averaged profiles of density, velocity and granular temperature which are in good agreement with the experiments. Moreover we measure the velocity distributions which show strong non-Gaussian behavior, as experiments pointed out, but also density correlations accounting for clustering, at odds with the experimental results. The hydrodynamics of the first model is discussed and an exact solution is found for the density and granular temperature as functions of the distance from the vibrating wall. The limitations of such a solution, in particular in a broad layer near the wall injecting energy, are discussed.