Granular Gas of Inelastic and Rough Maxwell Particles

Abstract

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 grains—on the dynamic properties of a granular gas. This is remedied by the inelastic rough hard-sphere model (IRHSM), where, apart from the coefficient of normal restitution, a constant coefficient of tangential restitution is introduced. In parallel to the simplification carried out when going from the IHSM to the IMM, we propose in this paper an inelastic rough Maxwell model (IRMM) as a simplification of the IRHSM. The tractability of the proposed model is illustrated by the exact evaluation of the collisional moments of first and second degree, and the most relevant ones of third and fourth degree. The results are applied to the evaluation of the rotational-to-translational temperature ratio and the velocity cumulants in the homogeneous cooling state.