Diffusion of impurities in a moderately dense confined granular gas

TL;DR

This paper develops a kinetic theory for impurity diffusion in a dense, vibrated granular gas, incorporating confinement effects, and validates it against simulations, with applications to segregation phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a collisional model for confined granular gases and derives diffusion coefficients using Chapman--Enskog, validated by simulations, addressing impurity transport in dense granular systems.

Findings

Good agreement between theory and simulations for moderate inelasticity.

Diffusion coefficients depend on energy injection and inelasticity.

Segregation behavior analyzed under thermal gradient and gravity.

Abstract

Mass transport of impurities immersed in a confined quasi-two-dimensional moderately dense granular gas of inelastic hard spheres is studied. The effect of the confinement on granular particles is modeled through a collisional model (the so-called $\Delta$-model) that includes an effective mechanism to transfer the kinetic energy injected by vibration in the vertical direction to the horizontal degrees of freedom of grains. The impurity can differ in mass, diameter, inelasticity, or the energy injection at collisions, compared to the gas particles. The Enskog--Lorentz kinetic equation for the impurities is solved via the Chapman--Enskog method to first order in spatial gradients for states close to the homogeneous steady state. As usual, the three diffusion transport coefficients for tracer particles in a mixture are given in terms of the solutions of a set of coupled linear integral equations which are solved by considering the lowest Sonine approximation. The theoretical predictions for the tracer diffusion coefficient (relating the mass flux with the gradient of the number density of tracer particles) are compared with both direct simulation Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations. The agreement is in general good, except for strong inelasticity and/or large contrast of energy injection at tracer-gas collisions compared to gas-gas collisions. Finally, as an application of our results, the segregation problem induced by both a thermal gradient and gravity is exhaustively analyzed.