Chapman–Enskog solutions to arbitrary order in Sonine polynomials I: Simple, rigid-sphere gas

The Chapman–Enskog solutions of the Boltzmann equations provide a basis for the computation of important transport coefficients for both simple gases and gas mixtures. These coefficients include the viscosities, the thermal conductivities, and diffusion coefficients. The Chapman–Enskog solutions are also useful for computation of the associated slip and jump coefficients near surfaces. Generally, these solutions are expressed in terms of Sonine polynomial expansions. While it has been found that relatively, low-order expansions (of order 4) can provide reasonable precision in the computation of the transport coefficients (to about 1 part in 1000), the adequacy of the low-order expansions for computation of the slip and jump coefficients still needs to be explored. Also of importance is the fact that such low-order expansions do not provide good convergence (in velocity space) for the actual Chapman–Enskog solutions even though the transport coefficients derived from these solutions appear to be reasonable. Thus, it is of some interest to explore Sonine polynomial expansions to higher orders. It is our purpose in this paper to report the results of our investigation of high-order, standard, Sonine polynomial expansions for the viscosity and the thermal conductivity related Chapman–Enskog solutions for a simple, rigid-sphere gas where we have carried out our calculations using expansions to order 150 and where our reported values for the transport coefficients have been demonstrated to converge to at least 25 significant digits. We note that, for a rigid-sphere gas, all of the relevant integrals needed for these solutions are evaluated analytically as pure fractions and, thus, results to any desired precision may be obtained. This work also indicates how results may be obtained in a similar fashion for realistic intermolecular potential models, and how gas-mixture problems may also be addressed with some additional effort.