Time dependent friction in a free gas

TL;DR

This paper investigates the time-dependent friction experienced by a body with complex shape in a perfect gas, deriving explicit expressions and showing that a stationary velocity does not exist.

Contribution

It extends previous models by analyzing friction for bodies with concavities, deriving explicit time-dependent friction expressions, and demonstrating the absence of stationary velocity.

Findings

Friction term is explicitly derived for bodies with concavity.

Friction is shown to be time-dependent and explicitly estimated.

No stationary velocity exists for the body under the studied conditions.

Abstract

We consider a body immersed in a perfect gas, moving under the action of a constant force E along the x axis . We assume the gas to be described by the mean-field approximation and interacting elastically with the body, we study the friction exerted by the gas on the body fixed at constant velocities. The dynamic in this setting was studied in previous papers for object with simple shape, showing new features in the dynamic but not in the friction term. The case of more general shape of the body was left out for further difficulties, we believe indeed that there are actually non trivial issues to be faced for these more general cases. To show this and in the in the spirit of getting a more realistic perspective in the study of friction problems, in this paper we focused our attention on the friction term itself, studying its behavior on a body with a more general kind of concavity and fixed at constant velocities. We derive the expression of the friction term for constant velocities, we show how it is time dependent and we give its exact estimate in time. Finally we use this result to show the absence of a stationary velocity in the actual dynamic of such a body.