Rayleigh-Benard convection in a hard disk system

Abstract

We do a generic study of the behavior of a hard disk system under the action of a thermal gradient in presence of an uniform gravity field. We observe the conduction-convection transition and measure the main system observables and fields as the thermal current, global pressure, velocity field, temperature field,... We can highlight two of the main results of this overall work: (1) for large enough thermal gradients and a given gravity, we show that the hydrodynamic fields (density, temperature and velocity) have a natural scaling form with the gradient. And (2) we show that local equilibrium holds if the mechanical pressure and the thermodynamic one are not equal, that is, the Stoke's assumption does not hold in this case. Moreover we observe that the best fit to the data is obtained when the bulk viscosity depends on the mechanical pressure.