A renormalization method for the Chapman-Enskog expansion

Abstract This paper introduces a procedure for rewriting the well-known Chapman-Enskog expansion used in the kinetic theory of gases. The usual Chapman-Enskog procedure will exhibit instability of the rest state for some finite truncations of the expansion. The rewritten (renormalized) expansion eliminates truncation instabilities and suggests a method for summation of the expansion as a nonlocal (generally nonlinear) operator in space.