Velocity Distribution of a Homogeneously Cooling Granular Gas

Abstract

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 confirmation is still missing. Using a microgravity experiment which allows the spatially homogeneous excitation of spheres via magnetic fields, we confirm the theoretically predicted exponential decay of the tails of the velocity distribution.

11 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Phase Diagram of Vertically Shaken Granular Matter
• Crystallization of a quasi-two-dimensional granular fluid
• Experimental investigation of the freely cooling granular gas
• Velocity distribution of a homogeneously driven two-dimensional granular gas
• Microgravity experiments on the collisional behavior of Saturnian ring particles
• Segregation in granular binary mixtures: Thermal diffusion
• Geometry-induced asymmetric diffusion
• Sonine approximation for collisional moments of granular gases of inelastic rough spheres
• Impact of high-energy tails on granular gas properties
• Granular Gas Cooling and Relaxation to the Steady State in Regard to the Overpopulated Tail of the Velocity Distribution

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Understanding planet formation using microgravity experiments
• Fluid-mediated sources of granular temperature at finite Reynolds numbers
• Diffusion of intruders in granular suspensions: Enskog theory and random walk interpretation
• High-energy velocity tails in uniformly heated granular materials
• Hydrodynamics of granular gases of inelastic and rough hard disks or spheres. I. Transport coefficients
• Kullback--Leibler Divergence of a Freely Cooling Granular Gas
• Kinetic Theory and Memory Effects of Homogeneous Inelastic Granular Gases under Nonlinear Drag
• Diffusion in multicomponent granular mixtures
• Dynamical and structural properties of an absorbing phase transition: a case study from granular systems
• Hyperuniformity of Weighted Particle Systems
• Translational and rotational non-Gaussianities in homogeneous freely evolving granular gases
• Mean-squared displacements of rough particles in polydisperse granular gases
• Kinetic theory of polydisperse granular mixtures: influence of the partial temperatures on transport properties. A review