ASYMPTOTIC ANALYSIS FOR A PARTICLE TRANSPORT EQUATION WITH INELASTIC SCATTERING IN EXTENDED KINETIC THEORY

Abstract

In this paper we perform the asymptotic analysis for a linear transport equation for test particles in an absorbing and inelastically scattering background, when the excited species can be considered as non-participating. This model is derived in the frame of extended kinetic theory and rescaled with the Knudsen number ∊. After examining the main properties of the collision model and of the scattering operator in the case with an infinite interval of energy as well as the case with a finite interval, the modified (compressed) Chapman–Enskog expansion procedure is applied to find the asymptotic equation for small mean free path. A specific feature of this model is that the collision operator has an infinite-dimensional null-space. The main result is that in the small mean free path approximation on [Formula: see text] level we obtain a free molecular flow for a suitable hydrodynamic quantity, rather than the diffusion which is typical for linear transport problems.