Advances In Kinetic Theory And Continuum Mechanics

This volume contains the proceedings of the symposium held on Friday 6 July 1990 at the University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI), France, in honor of Professor Henri Cabannes on the occasion of his retirement. There were about one hundred participants from nine countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the USA. Many of his past students or his colleagues were among the participants. The twenty-six papers in this volume are written versions submitted by the authors and cover almost all the fields in which Professor Cabannes has actively worked for more than forty-five years. The papers are presented in four chapters: classical kinetic theory and fluid dynamics, discrete kinetic theory, applied fluid mechanics, and continuum mechanics. The editors would like to take this opportunity to thank the generous spon sors of the symposium: the University Pierre et Marie Curie, Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (especially Academician R. Dautray and Dr. N. Camarcat) and Direction des Recherches et Etudes Techniques (especially Professor P. Lallemand). Many thanks are also due to all the participants for making the symposium a success. Finally, we thank Professor W. Beiglbock and his team at Springer-Verlag for producing this volume.

Contemporary Developments in Continuum Mechanics and Partial Differential Equations

This book goes beyond the scope of other works in the field with its thorough treatment of applications in a wide variety of disciplines. The third edition features a new section on constants of motion and symmetry and a new appendix on the Lorentz-Legendre expansion.

Fundamentals of Maxwel's Kinetic Theory of a Simple Monatomic Gas

The kinetic theory of gases as we know it dates to the paper of Boltzmann in 1872. The justification and context of this equation has been clarified over the past half century to the extent that it comprises one of the most complete examples of many-body analyses exhibiting the contraction from a microscopic to a mesoscopic description. The primary result is that the Boltzmann equation applies to dilute gases with short ranged interatomic forces, on space and time scales large compared to the corresponding atomic scales. Otherwise, there is no a priori limitation on the state of the system. This means it should be applicable even to systems driven very far from its eqUilibrium state. However, in spite of the physical simplicity of the Boltzmann equation, its mathematical complexity has masked its content except for states near eqUilibrium. While the latter are very important and the Boltzmann equation has been a resounding success in this case, the full potential of the Boltzmann equation to describe more general nonequilibrium states remains unfulfilled. An important exception was a study by Ikenberry and Truesdell in 1956 for a gas of Maxwell molecules undergoing shear flow. They provided a formally exact solution to the moment hierarchy that is valid for arbitrarily large shear rates. It was the first example of a fundamental description of rheology far from eqUilibrium, albeit for an unrealistic system. With rare exceptions, significant progress on nonequilibrium states was made only 20-30 years later.

This selection of 8 papers discusses ?Equations of Kinetic Physics? with emphasis on analysis, modelling and computing. The first 3 papers are on numerical methods for Vlasov-Poisson and Vlasov-Maxwell Equations ? Comparison between Particles and Eulerian Methods (G Manfredi and M R Feix), Computing BGK Instability with Eulerian Codes (M R Feix, Pertrand & A Ghieco) and Coupling Particles and Eulerian Methods (S Mas-Gallic and P A Raviart) ? Followed by a survey of kinetic and macroscopic models for semiconductor devices ? Boltzmann Equation, Drift-Diffusion Models (F Poupaud). In addition, there are 2 papers on the modelling and analysis of singular perturbation problems arising in plasma physics ? Derivation of the Child-Lagmuyr Emission Laws (P Degond) and Euler Models with Small Pressure Terms (F Bouchut) ? followed by two papers on the analysis and numerical analysis of the Boltzmann equations ? Symmetry Properties in the Polynomials Arising in Chapman-Enskog Expansion (L Desvillettes and F Golse) and A General Introduction to Computing the Boltzmann Equations with Random Particle Methods (B Perthame).