Linearized Boltzmann collision operator for a mixture of monatomic and polyatomic chemically reacting species

Abstract

At higher altitudes, for high temperature gases, for instance near space shuttles moving at hypersonic speed, not only mechanical collisions are affecting the gas flow, but also chemical reactions have an impact on such hypersonic flows. In this work we insert chemical reactions, in form of dissociations and recombinations (associations), in an existing model for a mixture of mono- and polyatomic (non-reacting) species. More general chemical reactions, e.g., bimolecular ones, can be obtained by instant combinations of associations and dissociations. The polyatomicity is modelled by a continuous internal energy variable and the evolution of the gas is described by a Boltzmann equation. In, e.g., the Chapman-Enskog process - and related half-space problems - the linearized Boltzmann collision operator plays a central role. Here we extend some important properties of the linearized Boltzmann collision operator to the introduced model with chemical reactions. A compactness result, stating that the linearized operator can be decomposed into a sum of a positive multiplication operator - the collision frequency - and a compact integral operator, is proven under reasonable assumptions on the collision kernel. The strategy is to show that the terms of the integral operator are (at least) uniform limits of Hilbert-Schmidt integral operators and therefore also compact operators. Self-adjointness of the linearized operator is a direct consequences. Moreover, bounds on - including coercivity of - the collision frequency are obtained for hard sphere like, as well as hard potentials with cutoff like models. As consequence, Fredholmness, as well as, the domain, of the linearized collision operator are obtained