Time-dependent homogeneous states of binary granular suspensions

The time evolution of a homogeneous bidisperse granular suspension is studied in the context of the Enskog kinetic equation. The influence of the surrounding viscous gas on the solid particles is modeled via a deterministic viscous drag force plus a stochastic Langevin-like term. It is found first that, regardless of the initial conditions, the system reaches (after a transient period lasting a few collisions per particle) a universal unsteady hydrodynamic regime where the distribution function of each species not only depends on the dimensionless velocity (as in the homogeneous cooling state) but also on the instantaneous temperature scaled with respect to the background temperature. To confirm this result, theoretical predictions for the time-dependent partial temperatures are compared against direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) results; the comparison shows an excellent agreement confirming the applicability of hydrodynamics in granular suspensions. Also, in the transient regime, the so-called Mpemba-like effect (namely, when an initially hotter sample cools sooner than the colder one) is analyzed for inelastic collisions. The theoretical analysis of the Mpemba effect is performed for initial states close to and far away from the asymptotic steady state. In both cases, good agreement is found again between theory and DSMC results. As a complement to the previous studies, we determine in this paper the dependence of the steady values of the dynamic properties of the suspension on the parameter space of the system. More specifically, we focus our attention on the temperature ratio T 1 / T 2 and the fourth degree cumulants c1 and c2 (measuring the departure of the velocity distributions f1 and f2 from their Maxwellian forms). While our approximate theoretical expression for T 1 / T 2 agrees very well with computer simulations, some discrepancies are found for the cumulants. Finally, a linear stability analysis of the steady state solution is also carried out showing that the steady state is always linearly stable.