Confined granular gases under the influence of vibrating walls

Abstract

In this paper we study the dynamics of a system composed of inelastic hard spheres or disks that are confined between two parallel vertically vibrating walls (the vertical direction is defined as the direction perpendicular to the walls). The distance between the two walls is supposed to be larger than twice the diameter of the particles so that the particles can pass over each other, but is still much smaller than the dimensions of the walls. Hence, the system can be considered to be quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-one-dimensional) in the hard spheres (disks) case. For dilute systems, a closed evolution equation for the one-particle distribution function is formulated that takes into account the effects of the confinement. Assuming the system is spatially homogeneous, the kinetic equation is solved approximating the distribution function by a two-temperature (horizontal and vertical) Gaussian distribution. The obtained evolution equations for the partial temperatures are solved, finding a very good agreement with molecular dynamics simulation results for a wide range of parameters (inelasticity, height and density) for states whose projection over a plane parallel to the walls is homogeneous. In the stationary state, where the energy lost in collisions is compensated by the energy injected by the walls, the pressure tensor in the horizontal direction is analyzed and its relation with an instability of the homogeneous state observed in the simulations is discussed.