Back Cover Text: This book addresses the study of the gaseous state of granular matter in the
conditions of rapid flow caused by a violent and sustained excitation. In this regime grains
only touch each other during collisions and hence kinetic theory is a very useful tool to
study granular flows. The main difference with respect to ordinary or molecular fluids is that
grains are macroscopic and so their collisions are inelastic. Given the interest in the
effects of collisional dissipation on granular media under rapid flow conditions the emphasis
of this book is on an idealized model (smooth inelastic hard spheres) that isolates this effect
from other important properties of granular systems. In this simple model the inelasticity of
collisions is only accounted for by a (positive) constant coefficient of normal restitution.
The author of this monograph uses a kinetic theory description (which can be considered as a
mesoscopic description between statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics) to study granular flows
from a microscopic point of view. In particular the inelastic version of the Boltzmann and
Enskog kinetic equations is the starting point of the analysis. Conventional methods such as
Chapman-Enskog expansion Grad¿s moment method and or kinetic models are generalized to
dissipative systems to get the forms of the transport coefficients and hydrodynamics. The
knowledge of granular hydrodynamics opens up the possibility of understanding interesting
problems such as the spontaneous formation of density clusters and velocity vortices in freely
cooling flows and or the lack of energy equipartition in granular mixtures. Some of the topics
covered in this monograph include: Navier-Stokes transport coefficients for granular gases at
moderate densities Long-wavelength instability in freely cooling flows Non-Newtonian transport
properties in granular shear flows Energy nonequipartition in freely cooling granular mixtures
Diffusion in strongly sheared granular mixtures Exact solutions to the Boltzmann equation for
inelastic Maxwell models
