Chapman–Enskog solutions to arbitrary order in Sonine polynomials IV: Summational expressions for the diffusion- and thermal conductivity-related bracket integrals

Abstract The Chapman–Enskog solutions of the Boltzmann equations provide a basis for the computation of important transport coefficients for both simple gases and gas mixtures. These coefficients include the viscosity, the thermal conductivity, and the diffusion coefficient. In a preceding paper on simple gases, we have shown that the use of higher-order Sonine polynomial expansions enables one to obtain results of arbitrary precision that are free of numerical error. In two subsequent papers, we have extended our original simple gas work to encompass binary gas mixture computations of the viscosity, thermal conductivity, diffusion, and thermal diffusion coefficients to high-order. In all of this previous work we retained the full dependence of our solutions on the molecular masses, the molecular sizes, the mole fractions, and the intermolecular potential model via the omega integrals up to the final point of solution via matrix inversion. The elements of the matrices to be inverted are, in each case, determined by appropriate combinations of bracket integrals which contain, in general form, all of the various dependencies. Since accurate, explicit, general expressions for bracket integrals are not available in the literature beyond order 3, and since such general expressions are necessary for any extensive program of computations of the transport coefficients involving Sonine polynomial expansions to higher orders, we have investigated alternative methods of constructing appropriately general bracket integral expressions that do not rely on the term-by-term, expansion and pattern matching techniques that we developed for our previous work. It is our purpose in this paper to report the results of our efforts to obtain useful, alternative, general expressions for the bracket integrals associated with the diffusion- and thermal conductivity-related Chapman–Enskog solutions for gas mixtures. Specifically, we have obtained such expressions in summational form that are conducive to use in high-order transport coefficient computations for arbitrary gas mixtures and have computed and reported explicit expressions for all of the orders up to 5.