A kinetic Fokker–Planck approach for modeling variable hard-sphere gas mixtures

Kinetic Fokker–Planck (FP) methods for modeling rarefied gas flows have received increasing attention over the last few years. However, formulating such models for realistic multi-species gases is still an open subject of research. Therefore, in this letter, we develop a kinetic FP model for describing gas mixtures with particles interacting according to the variable hard-sphere interaction potential. In accordance with the kinetic FP framework, a stochastic solution algorithm is employed in order to solve the model on a particle level. Different test cases are carried out, and the performance of the proposed method is compared with the direct simulation Monte Carlo algorithm.