| Autor: |
Galanti, Marta, Fanelli, Duccio, Piazza, Francesco |
| Rok vydání: |
2013 |
| Předmět: |
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| Druh dokumentu: |
Working Paper |
| Popis: |
Describing particle transport at the macroscopic or mesoscopic level in non-ideal environments poses fundamental theoretical challenges in domains ranging from inter and intra-cellular transport in biology to diffusion in porous media. Yet, often the nature of the constraints coming from many-body interactions or reflecting a complex and confining environment are better understood and modeled at the microscopic level. In this paper we investigate the subtle link between microscopic exclusion processes and the mean-field equations that ensue from them in the continuum limit. We derive a generalized nonlinear advection diffusion equation suitable for describing transport in a inhomogeneous medium in the presence of an external field. Furthermore, taking inspiration from a recently introduced exclusion process involving agents with non-zero size, we introduce a modified diffusion equation appropriate for describing transport in a non-ideal fluid of $d$-dimensional hard spheres. We consider applications of our equations to the problem of diffusion to an absorbing sphere in a non-ideal self-crowded fluid and to the problem of gravitational sedimentation. We show that our formalism allows one to recover known results. Moreover, we introduce the notions of point-like and extended crowding, which specify distinct routes for obtaining macroscopic transport equations from microscopic exclusion processes. |
| Databáze: |
arXiv |
| Externí odkaz: |
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