Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Shock propagation in dilute inelastic and elastic media (Pre-synopsis seminar)

Jilmy P. Joy

Institute of Mathematical Sciences

There are a variety of physical phenomena like atomic explosion, crater formation, supernova etc., in which an intense localised perturbation results in a shock wave propagating through the system. In a dilute gas, the shock propagation may be studied using hydrodynamics (TvNS theory), and is one of the classic solutions in gas dynamics. In this talk, I will discuss the results of comparison between extensive event driven molecular dynamics simulations of particle-based models in two and three dimensions and the TvNS theory. In particular, certain discrepancies will be pointed out. To understand these discrepancies, we test the assumption of the TvNS theory within the simulations. In addition, I will also discuss extending these studies to inelastic media like granular systems. Using scaling arguments, we predict the growth law of the shock propagation and show that data from several experiments on granular systems can be described well within this framework.