Energy Production Rates of Multicomponent Granular Gases of Rough Particles. A Unified View of Hard-Disk and Hard-Sphere Systems

Abstract: Granular gas mixtures modeled as systems of inelastic and rough particles, either hard disks on a plane or hard spheres, are considered. Both classes of systems are embedded in a three-dimensional space ($d=3$) but, while in the hard-sphere case the translational and angular velocities are vectors with the same dimensionality (and thus there are $d_{\text{tr}}=3$ translational and $d_{\text{rot}}=3$ rotational degrees of freedom), in the hard-disk case the translational velocity vectors are planar (i.e., $d_{\text{tr}}=2$ translational degrees of freedom) and the angular velocity vectors are orthogonal to the motion plane (i.e., $d_{\text{rot}}=1$ rotational degree of freedom). This complicates a unified presentation of both classes of systems, in contrast to what happens for smooth, spinless particles, where a treatment of $d$-dimensional spheres is possible. In this paper, a kinetic-theory derivation of the (collisional) energy production rates $\xi_{ij}^{\text{tr}}$ and $\xi_{ij}^{\text{rot}}$ (where the indices $i$ and $j$ label different components) in terms of the numbers of degrees of freedom $d_{\text{tr}}$ and $d_{\text{rot}}$ is presented. Known hard-sphere and hard-disk expressions are recovered by particularizing to $(d_{\text{tr}},d_{\text{rot}})=(3,3)$ and $(d_{\text{tr}},d_{\text{rot}})=(2,1)$, respectively. Moreover, in the case of spinless particles with $d=d_{\text{tr}}$, known energy production rates $\xi_{ij}^{\text{tr}}=\xi_{ij}$ of smooth $d$-dimensional spheres are also recovered.