Attempted density blowup in a freely cooling dilute granular gas: hydrodynamics versus molecular dynamics

TL;DR

This study compares molecular dynamics simulations with ideal hydrodynamic predictions to investigate the potential density blowup in a freely cooling granular gas, finding strong initial agreement but deviations near the singularity.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates the existence of an attempted density blowup in granular gases and extends hydrodynamic theory to include transport and density effects near singularities.

Findings

Quantitative agreement between MD simulations and ideal hydrodynamics during early stages.

Deviations occur as the singularity is approached, indicating breakdown of ideal theory.

Extended hydrodynamic model accounts for transport and finite density effects.

Abstract

It has been recently shown (Fouxon et al. 2007) that, in the framework of ideal granular hydrodynamics (IGHD), an initially smooth hydrodynamic flow of a granular gas can produce an infinite gas density in a finite time. Exact solutions that exhibit this property have been derived. Close to the singularity, the granular gas pressure is finite and almost constant. This work reports molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of a freely cooling gas of nearly elastically colliding hard disks, aimed at identifying the "attempted" density blowup regime. The initial conditions of the simulated flow mimic those of one particular solution of the IGHD equations that exhibits the density blowup. We measure the hydrodynamic fields in the MD simulations and compare them with predictions from the ideal theory. We find a remarkable quantitative agreement between the two over an extended time interval, proving the existence of the attempted blowup regime. As the attempted singularity is approached, the hydrodynamic fields, as observed in the MD simulations, deviate from the predictions of the ideal solution. To investigate the mechanism of breakdown of the ideal theory near the singularity, we extend the hydrodynamic theory by accounting separately for the gradient-dependent transport and for finite density corrections.