Previous experiments have revealed that shock waves driven through dissipative gases may become unstable, for example, in granular gases, and in molecular gases undergoing strong relaxation effects. The mechanisms controlling these instabilities are not well understood. We successfully isolated and investigated this instability in the canonical problem of piston driven shock waves propagating into a medium characterized by inelastic collision processes. We treat the standard model of granular gases, where particle collisions are taken as inelastic with constant coefficient of restitution. The inelasticity is activated for sufficiently strong collisions. Molecular dynamic simulations were performed for 30,000 particles. We find that all shock waves investigated become unstable, with density non-uniformities forming in the relaxation region. The wavelength of these fingers is found comparable to the characteristic relaxation thickness. Shock Hugoniot curves for both elastic and inelastic collisions were obtained analytically and numerically. Analysis of these curves indicate that the instability is not of the Bethe-Zeldovich-Thompson or Dyakov-Kontorovich types. Analysis of the shock relaxation rates and rates for clustering in a convected fluid element with the same thermodynamic history outruled the clustering instability of a homogeneous granular gas. Instead, wave reconstruction of the early transient evolution indicates that the onset of instability occurs during the re-pressurization of the gas following the initial relaxation of the medium behind the lead shock. This re-pressurization gives rise to internal pressure waves in the presence of strong density gradients. This indicates that the mechanism of instability is more likely of the vorticity-generating Richtmyer-Meshkov type, relying on the action of the inner pressure waves development during the transient relaxation.
Starting from a recent derivation of the energy production rates in terms of the number of translational and rotational degrees of freedom, a comparative study on different granular temperatures in gas mixtures of inelastic and rough disks or spheres is carried out. Both the homogeneous freely cooling state and the state driven by a stochastic thermostat are considered. It is found that the relaxation number of collisions per particle is generally smaller for disks than for spheres, the mean angular velocity relaxing more rapidly than the temperature ratios. In the asymptotic regime of the und…
Conditions for the stability under linear perturbations around the homogeneous cooling state are studied for dilute granular gases of inelastic and rough hard disks or spheres with constant coefficients of normal ($α$) and tangential ($β$) restitution. After a formally exact linear stability analysis of the Navier--Stokes--Fourier hydrodynamic equations in terms of the translational ($d_t$) and rotational ($d_r$) degrees of freedom, the transport coefficients derived in the companion paper [A. Megías and A. Santos, "Hydrodynamics of granular gases of inelastic and rough hard disks or spheres. …
The transport coefficients for dilute granular gases of inelastic and rough hard disks or spheres with constant coefficients of normal ($α$) and tangential ($β$) restitution are obtained in a unified framework as functions of the number of translational ($d_t$) and rotational ($d_r$) degrees of freedom. The derivation is carried out by means of the Chapman--Enskog method with a Sonine-like approximation in which, in contrast to previous approaches, the reference distribution function for angular velocities does not need to be specified. The well-known case of purely smooth $d$-dimensional part…
A polydisperse granular gas made of inelastic and rough hard disks is considered. Focus is laid on the kinetic-theory derivation of the partial energy production rates and the total cooling rate as functions of the partial densities and temperatures (both translational and rotational) and of the parameters of the mixture (masses, diameters, moments of inertia, and mutual coefficients of normal and tangential restitution). The results are applied to the homogeneous cooling state of the system and the associated nonequipartition of energy among the different components and degrees of freedom. It…
We study the conditions under which a Mpemba-like effect emerges in granular gases of inelastic and rough hard disks driven by a class of thermostats characterized by the splitting of the noise intensity into translational and rotational counterparts. Thus, granular particles are affected by a stochastic force and a stochastic torque, which inject translational and rotational energy, respectively. We realize that a certain choice of a thermostat of this class can be characterized just by the total intensity and the fraction of noise transferred to the rotational degree of freedom with respect …
We study a dilute granular gas immersed in a thermal bath made of smaller particles with masses not much smaller than the granular ones in this work. Granular particles are assumed to have inelastic and hard interactions, losing energy in collisions as accounted by a constant coefficient of normal restitution. The interaction with the thermal bath is modeled by a nonlinear drag force plus a white-noise stochastic force. The kinetic theory for this system is described by an Enskog--Fokker--Planck equation for the one-particle velocity distribution function. To get explicit results of the temper…
Buoyancy-driven (thermal) convection in dilute granular media, fluidized by a vibrating base, is known to appear without the need of lateral boundaries in a restricted region of parameters (inelasticity, gravity, intensity of energy injection). We have recently discovered a second buoyancy-driven convection effect which occurs at any value of the parameters, provided that the impact of particles with the lateral walls is inelastic (Pontuale et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 098006 (2016)). It is understood that this novel convection effect is strictly correlated to the existence of perpendicular e…
Previous experimental and theoretical evidence has shown that convective flow may appear in granular fluids if subjected to a thermal gradient and gravity (Rayleigh-Bénard-type convection). In contrast to this, we present here evidence of gravity-free thermal convection in a granular gas, with no presence of external thermal gradients either. Convection is here maintained steady by internal gradients due to dissipation and thermal sources at the same temperature. The granular gas is composed by identical disks and is enclosed in a rectangular region. Our results are obtained by means of an eve…
Shocks in granular media have been shown to develop instabilities. We address the role that early stages of shock development have on this type of instability. We look at the evolution of shock waves driven by a piston in a dilute system of smooth inelastic disks, using both discrete-particle and continuum modelling. To mimic a realistic granular gas, viscoelastic collisions are approximated with an impact velocity threshold $u^*$ needed for inelastic collisions to occur. We show that behaviour of the shock evolution is dependent on the ratio of piston velocity to impact velocity threshold $u_…
We consider the inelastic Maxwell model, which consists of a collection of particles that are characterized by only their velocities, and evolving through binary collisions and external driving. At any instant, a particle is equally likely to collide with any of the remaining particles. The system evolves in continuous time with mutual collisions and driving taken to be point processes with rates $τ_c^-{1}$ and $τ_w^{-1}$ respectively. The mutual collisions conserve momentum and are inelastic, with a coefficient of restitution $r$. The velocity change of a particle with velocity $v$, due to dr…
We numerically and theoretically investigate how the softness of particles affects the rheology of sheared dilute granular gases. We find that the kinetic theory predicts the deviation of the flow curve from the Bagnold scaling, and it works well below a certain shear rate when we compare with the simulation results. It is also found that there is no theoretical solution above this shear rate, which is because the energy loss due to inelastic collisions cannot be balanced with the energy injection by the shear.
Grad's method of moments is employed to develop higher-order Grad's moment equations---up to first 26-moments---for granular gases within the framework of the (inelastic) Boltzmann equation. The homogeneous cooling state of a freely cooling granular gas is investigated with the Grad's 26-moment equations in a semi-linearized setting and it is shown that the granular temperature in the homogeneous cooling state still decays according to Haff's law while the other higher-order moments decay on a faster time scale. The constitutive relations for stress and heat flux (the Navier--Stokes and Fourie…
Rheology of a dilute cohesive granular gas is theoretically and numerically studied. The flow curve between the shear viscosity and the shear rate is derived from the inelastic Boltzmann equation for particles having square-well potentials in a simple shear flow. It is found that (i) the stable uniformly sheared state only exists above a critical shear rate and (ii) the viscosity in the uniformly sheared flow is almost identical to that for uniformly sheared flow of hard core granular particles. Below the critical shear rate, clusters grow with time, in which the viscosity can be approximated …
Whereas the original Boltzmann's $H$-theorem applies to elastic collisions, its rigorous generalization to the inelastic case is still lacking. Nonetheless, it has been conjectured in the literature that the relative entropy of the velocity distribution function with respect to the homogeneous cooling state (HCS) represents an adequate nonequilibrium entropy-like functional for an isolated freely cooling granular gas. In this work, we present molecular dynamics results reinforcing this conjecture and rejecting the choice of the Maxwellian over the HCS as a reference distribution. These results…
In contrast to molecular gases, granular gases are characterized by inelastic collisions and require therefore permanent driving to maintain a constant kinetic energy. The kinetic theory of granular gases describes how the average velocity of the particles decreases after the driving is shut off. Moreover it predicts that the rescaled particle velocity distribution will approach a stationary state with overpopulated high-velocity tails as compared to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. While this fundamental theoretical result was reproduced by numerical simulations, an experimental confirmati…
The most widely used model for granular gases is perhaps the inelastic hard-sphere model (IHSM), where the grains are assumed to be perfectly smooth spheres colliding with a constant coefficient of normal restitution. A much more tractable model is the inelastic Maxwell model (IMM), in which the velocity-dependent collision rate is replaced by an effective mean-field constant. This simplification has been taken advantage of by many researchers to find a number of exact results within the IMM. On the other hand, both the IHSM and IMM neglect the impact of roughness -- generally present in real …
