Chapman–Enskog solutions to arbitrary order in Sonine polynomials III: Diffusion, thermal diffusion, and thermal conductivity in a binary, rigid-sphere, gas mixture

The Chapman–Enskog solutions of the Boltzmann equation provide a basis for the computation of important transport coefficients for both simple gases and gas mixtures. These coefficients include the viscosity, the thermal conductivity, and the diffusion coefficient. In a preceding paper (I), for simple, rigid-sphere gases (i.e. single-component, monatomic gases) we have shown that the use of higher-order Sonine polynomial expansions enables one to obtain results of arbitrary precision that are free of numerical error and, in a second paper (II), we have extended our initial simple gas work to modeling the viscosity in a binary, rigid-sphere, gas mixture. In this latter paper we reported an extensive set of order 60 results which are believed to constitute the best currently available benchmark viscosity values for binary, rigid-sphere, gas mixtures. It is our purpose in this paper to similarly report the results of our investigation of relatively high-order (order 70), standard, Sonine polynomial expansions for the diffusion- and thermal conductivity-related Chapman–Enskog solutions for binary gas mixtures of rigid-sphere molecules. We note that in this work, as in our previous work, we have retained the full dependence of the solution on the molecular masses, the molecular sizes, the mole fractions, and the intermolecular potential model via the omega integrals. For rigid-sphere gases, all of the relevant omega integrals needed for these solutions are analytically evaluated and, thus, results to any desired precision can be obtained. The values of the transport coefficients obtained using Sonine polynomial expansions for the Chapman–Enskog solutions converge and, therefore, the exact diffusion and thermal conductivity solutions to a given degree of convergence can be determined with certainty by expanding to sufficiently high an order. We have used Mathematica® for its versatility in permitting both symbolic and high-precision computations. Our results also establish confidence in the results reported recently by other authors who used direct numerical techniques to solve the relevant Chapman–Enskog equations. While in all of the direct numerical methods more-or-less full calculations need to be carried out with each variation in molecular parameters, our work has utilized explicit, general expressions for the necessary matrix elements that retain the complete parametric dependence of the problem and, thus, only a matrix inversion at the final step is need