A kinetic Fokker-Planck approach to model hard-sphere gas mixtures

Abstract

Since its first introduction, it has always been a subject of research to find models for a meaningful approximation of the highly accurate but complex Boltzmann equation. In the kinetic Fokker-Planck (FP) approach, a FP operator in velocity space is employed to approximate the collision integral of the Boltzmann equation. Instead of directly solving the resulting FP equation, a Monte Carlo technique is used to model an associated random process. This approach leads to an efficient stochastic solution algorithm. In recent years, the FP ansatz has become increasingly popular. Nevertheless, the modeling of gas mixtures in the context of kinetic FP has so far only been addressed in a very few papers. This article introduces a kinetic FP model that is capable of describing gas mixtures with particles interacting according to the hard-sphere collision model. The model is constructed to reproduce Grad's 13 moment equations on a Navier-Stokes level of accuracy for gas mixtures with an arbitrary number of constituents. A stochastic simulation algorithm is derived that ensures a correct evolution of the species diffusion velocities and the species temperatures for a homogeneous gas, regardless of the applied time step size. It is shown that the proposed model is capable of correctly predicting shear stresses, heat fluxes, and diffusion velocities for different test cases, employing a He-Ar mixture.