Departure from Fourier's Law for Fluidized Granular Media

Abstract

Molecular dynamics simulations of the inelastic hard sphere model for granular media have been done to study the heat conduction between two parallel plates. The results show that Fourier's law is not valid and a new term proportional to the density gradient must be added to compute the heat flux. The new transport coefficient associated with the density gradient dependence has been measured vanishing in the case of elastic collisions.