Temperatures in Grains and Plasma

Abstract

Grains are widely assumed to be characterized by a single temperature -- derived either from the configurational entropy, or employing the kinetic theory. Yet granular media do have two temperatures, $T_g$ and $T$, pertaining to the grains and atoms. It is argued here that a two-temperature plasma yields a more useful analogy for grains than a molecular gas: (1)~Irreversible collisions also occur in plasma, to reach the equilibrium of equal temperature. (2)~The plasma energy is not linear in the two temperatures; it is quadratic in the temperature difference, minimal at equilibrium. Both points have valid analogues in grains, yielding useful insights.

5 pages

References in corpus (5)

• Two-temperature continuum thermomechanics of deforming amorphous solids
• From Elasticity to Hypoplasticity: Dynamics of Granular Solids
• Granular Solid Hydrodynamics (GSH): a broad-ranged macroscopic theory of granular media
• Applying GSH to a Wide Range of Experiments in Granular Media
• Why Granular Media Are Thermal, and Quite Normal, After All

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Hydrodynamics of fault gouges from constitutive modelling to the physics of friction