Dynamics of a hard sphere granular impurity

Abstract

An impurity particle coupling to its host fluid via inelastic hard sphere collisions is considered. It is shown that the exact equation for its distribution function can be mapped onto that for an impurity with elastic collisions and an effective mass. Application of this result to the Enskog--Lorentz kinetic equation leads to several conclusions: 1) every solution in the elastic case is equivalent to a class of solutions in the granular case; 2) for an equilibrium host fluid the granular impurity approaches equilibrium at a different temperature, with a dominant diffusive mode at long times; 3) for a granular host fluid in its scaling state, the granular impurity approaches the corresponding scaling solution.