Monatomic gas as a singular limit of polyatomic gas in molecular extended thermodynamics with many moments

The difference in the theoretical structure between monatomic and polyatomic gases in highly nonequilibrium states is discussed from the viewpoint of molecular extended thermodynamics (MET) of rarefied gases, which is free from the local equilibrium assumption. The MET theories of these two types of gases are based on the moment balance equations with different hierarchy structures due to whether the internal degrees of freedom of a molecule are incorporated in their distribution functions or not. In particular, the number of balance equations in the MET theory of polyatomic gases is greater than the number in the corresponding theory of monatomic gases. The closure procedure for the system of balance equations of polyatomic gases obtained in a recent paper (Arima et al., 2014) is adopted. We prove that the solutions for polyatomic gases converge, in the limit where the degrees of freedom of a molecule D tend to 3, to the ones for monatomic gases provided that we impose appropriate initial conditions compatible with monatomic gases. Thus a MET theory of rarefied monatomic gases can be identified as a singular limit of the corresponding MET theory of rarefied polyatomic gases. As illustrative examples, the asymptotic behaviors when D→3 in the dispersion relation of ultrasonic waves and in the shock wave structure are shown.