Nonlinear transport in a dilute binary mixture of mechanically different particles (Q1897035)

This paper deals with the transport properties of a mixture of particles of two different species (color). Particles of different colors can be distinguished even in the limit of mechanically identical particles, which is a mean to evaluate mutual diffusion, but are in general accelerated in two opposite directions. In the low density limit, this binary mixture is described by two homogeneous coupled Boltzmann equations \({1 \over m_1} {\partial \over \partial {\mathbf v}} \cdot [({\mathbf F}_1{\mathbf F}_1^{\text{drag}}) f_1] = J_{11} [f_1, f_1] J_{12} [f_1, f_2]\), \({1 \over m_2} {\partial \over \partial {\mathbf v}} \cdot [({\mathbf F}_2{\mathbf F}_2^{\text{drag}}) f_2] = J_{22} [f_2, f_2] J_{21} [f_2, f_1]\), where \(J_{rs} [f_r, f_s]\) is the Boltzmann collision term \(J_{rs} [f_r, f_s] = \int d {\mathbf v}_1 \int d \Omega |{\mathbf v} - {\mathbf v}_1 |\sigma_{rs} ({\mathbf v} - {\mathbf v}_1, \theta) \times [f_r ({\mathbf v}') f_s({\mathbf v}_1') - f_r ({\mathbf v}) f_s({\mathbf v}_1)]\) (with standard notations). The particles are driven by the action of an external (color) force \({\mathbf R}_r\), which produces the mutual diffusion, and by a drag force \({\mathbf F}_r^{\text{drag}}\) which is proportional to the opposite of the velocity. For Maxwell molecules, i.e. particles interacting via a fifth inverse power law, a moment of order \(k\) of the collision operator involves moments of order less or equal than \(k\). This allows to explicitly compute the mass flux, the momentum flux and the color conductivity coefficient, which gives the ratio between the mass flux and the color field strength for each species of particles, in terms of the field strength, the mass ratio and the molar fraction. It appears that the expression giving this color conductivity coefficient adopts a ``universal'' form in reduced units (the reduced color conductivity coefficient is a function only of the reduced field strength), while the other formulae like the one giving the pressure tensor are parametrized by the physical coefficients of the system. The color conductivity coefficient reduces to the mutual diffusion coefficient in the zero-field limit. Some physically interesting limiting cases (the Lorentz gas, the Rayleigh gas, and the Brownian motion) are also discussed, and an approximate expression for the velocity distribution (using a maximum entropy method constrained by the knowledge of the exact mass and moment fluxes) is also given.