A consistent kinetic model for a two-component mixture with an application to plasma

Abstract: We consider a non reactive multi component gas mixture.We propose a class of models, which can be easily generalized to multiple species. The two species mixture is modelled by a system of kinetic BGK equations featuring two interaction terms to account for momentum and energy transfer between the species. We prove consistency of our model: conservation properties, positivity of the solutions for the space homogeneous case, positivity of all temperatures, H-theorem and convergence to a global equilibrium in the space homogeneous case in the form of a global Maxwell distribution. Thus, we are able to derive the usual macroscopic conservation laws. In particular, by considering a mixture composed of ions and electrons, we derive the macroscopic equations of ideal MHD from our model.