Origins of Hydrodynamics for a Granular Gas

Abstract

The basis for a hydrodynamic description of granular gases is discussed for a low density gas of smooth, inelastic hard spheres. The more fundamental mesoscopic description is taken to be the nonlinear Boltzmann kinetic equation. Two arguments are presented in favor of a hydrodynamics for granular gases. The first one is the concept of a "normal" solution and its explicit approximate construction via the Chapman-Enskog method. The second is the demonstration of hydrodynamic modes in the spectrum of the generator for the dynamics of small spatial perturbations of the homogeneous reference state. In the first case, a derivation of the nonlinear hydrodynamic equations is given to Navier-Stokes order, with explicit expressions for the transport coefficients. The approach is formal and the context of the derivation is left unspecified, although internal mathematically consistency is demonstrated. The second method is more restricted, leading only to linearized hydrodynamics, but with the potential to define more sharply the context of hydrodynamics.