Hydrodynamic limit of a coupled Cucker-Smale system with strong and weak internal variable relaxation

Abstract: In this paper, we present the hydrodynamic limit of a multiscale system describing the dynamics of two populations of agents with alignment interactions and the effect of an internal variable. It consists of a kinetic equation coupled with an Euler-type equation inspired by the thermomechanical Cucker--Smale (TCS) model. We propose a novel drag force for the fluid-particle interaction reminiscent of Stokes' law. Whilst the macroscopic species is regarded as a self-organized background fluid that affects the kinetic species, the latter is assumed sparse and does not affect the macroscopic dynamics. We propose two hyperbolic scalings, in terms of a strong and weak relaxation regime of the internal variable towards the background population. Under each regime, we prove the rigorous hydrodynamic limit towards a coupled system composed of two Euler-type equations. Inertial effects of momentum and internal variable in the kinetic species disappear for strong relaxation, whereas a nontrivial dynamics for the internal variable appears for weak relaxation. Our analysis covers both the case of Lipschitz and weakly singular influence functions