Freely cooling granular gases with short-ranged attractive potentials

E Murphy and S Subramaniam, PHYSICS OF FLUIDS, 27, 043301 (2015).

DOI: 10.1063/1.4916674

We treat the case of an undriven gas of inelastic hard-spheres with short-ranged attractive potentials via an extension of the pseudo- Liouville operator formalism. New evolution equations for the granular temperature and coordination number are obtained. The granular temperature exhibits deviation from both Haff's law and the case of long-ranged potentials. We verify this departure using soft-sphere discrete element method simulations. Excellent agreement is found for the duration of the simulation even beyond where exclusively binary collisions are expected. Simulations show the emergence of strong spatial-velocity correlations on the length scale of the last peak in the pair-correlation function but do not show strong correlations beyond this length scale. We argue that molecular chaos may remain an adequate approximation if the system is modelled as a Smoluchowski type equation with aggregation and break-up processes. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.

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