Mass flux of a binary mixture of Maxwell molecules under shear flow

Transport coefficients associated with the mass flux of a binary mixture of Maxwell molecules under uniform shear flow are exactly determined from the Boltzmann kinetic equation. A normal solution is obtained via a Chapman–Enskog-like expansion around a local shear flow distribution that retains all the hydrodynamics orders in the shear rate. In the first order of the expansion the mass flux is proportional to the gradients of mole fraction, pressure, and temperature but, due to the anisotropy induced in the system by the shear flow, mutual diffusion, pressure diffusion and thermal diffusion tensors are identified instead of the conventional scalar coefficients. These tensors are obtained in terms of the shear rate and the parameters of the mixture (particle masses, concentrations, and force constants). The description is made both in the absence and in the presence of an external thermostat introduced in computer simulations to compensate for the viscous heating. As expected, the analysis shows that there is no simple relationship between the results with and without the thermostat. The dependence of the three diffusion tensors on the shear rate is illustrated in the tracer limit case, the results showing that the deviation of the generalized transport coefficients from their equilibrium forms is in general quite important.