Strongly Degenerate Parabolic-Hyperbolic Systems Modeling Polydisperse Sedimentation with Compression

We show how existing models for the sedimentation of monodisperse flocculated suspensions and of polydisperse suspensions of rigid spheres differing in size can be combined to yield a new theory of the sedimentation processes of polydisperse suspensions forming compressible sediments (“sedimentation with compression” or “sedimentation-consolidation process”). For N solid particle species, this theory reduces in one space dimension to an N × N coupled system of quasilinear degenerate convection-diffusion equations. Analyses of the characteristic polynomials of the Jacobian of the convective flux vector and of the diffusion matrix show that this system is of strongly degenerate parabolic-hyperbolic type for arbitrary N and particle size distributions. Bounds for the eigenvalues of both matrices are derived. The mathematical model for N = 3 is illustrated by a numerical simulation obtained by the Kurganov–Tadmor central difference scheme for convectiondiffusion problems. The numerical scheme exploits the derived bounds on the eigenvalues to keep the numerical diffusion to a minimum.