Kinetic relaxation models for energy transport (Q2369997)

The authors consider a kinetic equation with a Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) relaxation operator toward a local Gibbs state of a fairly general form, \(\gamma(E)\), under the assumption of conserved mass and energy. Writing the kinetic equation in diffusive scaling, the Hilbert expansion method is used to perform a first-order asymptotic analysis with respect to the diffusive parameter. This yields ``macroscopic'' energy-transport equations consisting of two parabolic equations, with the position density and the energy density as unknowns. This asymptotic analysis is purely formal (no convergence theorems are provided). The analysis is completed by a H-theorem for the kinetic equation and an entropy-dissipation theorem for the energy-transport equations. Moreover, the conservative and symmetric form of the energy-transport equations are presented. In the second part of the paper, more explicit calculations are carried out for certain examples of Gibbs states, namely a power law with negative exponent \(\gamma(E) = CE^{-k}\), a cut-off power with positive exponent \(\gamma(E) = (E_2 - E)_+^k\), the Maxwellian distribution \(\gamma(E) = e^{-E}\), the Fermi-Dirac distribution \(\gamma(E) = (e^E +\eta)^{-1}\) and the Bose-Einstein distribution \(\gamma(E) = (e^E -\eta)^{-1}\).