Rheological properties in a low-density granular mixture

Abstract

Steady simple shear flow of a low-density binary mixture of inelastic smooth hard spheres is studied in the context of the Boltzmann equation. This equation is solved by using two different and complementary approaches: a Sonine polynomial expansion and the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo method. The dependence of the shear and normal stresses as well as of the steady granular temperature on both the dissipation and the parameters of the mixture (ratios of masses, concentration, and sizes) is analyzed. In contrast to previous studies, the theory predicts and the simulation confirms that the partial temperatures of each species are different, even in the weak dissipation limit. In addition, the simulation shows that the theory reproduces fairly well the values of the shear stress and the phenomenon of normal stress differences. On the other hand, here we are mainly interested in analyzing transport in the homogeneous shear flow so that, the possible formation of particle clusters is ignored in our description.