Which moments are appropriate to describe gases with internal structure in Rational Extended Thermodynamics?

Motivated by a recent paper of Pennisi in the relativistic framework Pennisi (2021), we revisit the previous approach of two hierarchies of moments critically and propose a new natural physical hierarchy of moments to describe classical rarefied non-polytropic polyatomic gas in the framework of Molecular Rational Extended Thermodynamics. The differential system of the previous approach is proved to be a principal subsystem of the present one. The main idea is that at the molecular level, the total energy is the kinetic energy plus the energy of internal mode due to the rotation and vibration, and the increasing moments contain this total energy as power in which the power index increases with the number of tensorial indexes. In particular, we consider the case of 15 moments, and we close the system using the variational method of the Maximum Entropy Principle. We prove the convexity of entropy and the possibility to put the system in symmetric form. This more rich kinetic framework may be interesting also as possible applications to biomathematics or other fields in which kinetic models were applied recently with success. •We revisit the previous approach of moments critically and propose a new one.•Previous system is proved to be a principal subsystem of the present one.•We deduce the differential system of 15 moments using the Maximum Entropy Principle.•This richer kinetic framework may be interesting for applications to other fields.