Which moments are appropriate to describe gases with internal structure in Rational Extended Thermodynamics?

Abstract

Motivated by a recent paper of Pennisi (2021) in the relativistic framework, we revisit the previous approach of two hierarchies of moments critically and propose a new natural physical hierarchy of moments to describe classical rarefied non-polytropic polyatomic gas in the framework of Molecular Rational Extended Thermodynamics. The differential system of the previous approach is proved to be a \emph{principal subsystem} of the present one. The main idea is that at the molecular level, the total energy is the kinetic energy plus the energy of internal mode due to the rotation and vibration, and the increasing moments contain this total energy as power in which the power index increases with the number of tensorial indexes. In particular, we consider the case of $15$ moments, and we close the system using the variational method of the Maximum Entropy Principle. We prove the convexity of entropy and the possibility to put the system in symmetric form. This more rich kinetic framework may be interesting also as possible applications to biomathematics or other fields in which kinetic models were applied recently with success.