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GRANULAR MIXTURES AT MODERATE DENSITIES. A KINETIC THEORY APPROACH

Under rapid flow conditions, it is well known that many features of granular media can be modeled by a fluid of smooth hard spheres with inelastic collisions. In the rapid flow regime, the sample of grains resembles a granular fluid so that binary collisions prevail and kinetic theory tools can be a reliable approach for analyzing granular flows. This talk provides a concise overview of some advances made in the last few years for multicomponent granular fluids by using the Enskog kinetic equation. This equation applies in principle to moderate dense gases. Some of the results will cover aspects such as energy nonequipartition, Navier-Stokes transport properties, segregation or mixing and instabilities in freely cooling states. In some cases, the analytical results will be confronted against Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations, showing the reliability of kinetic theory to describe granular flows even for strong collisional dissipation.