Lyapunov instability of two-dimensional fluids: Hard dumbbells

We generalize Benettin's classical algorithm for the computation of the full Lyapunov spectrum to the case of a two-dimensional fluid composed of linear molecules modeled as hard dumbbells. Each dumbbell, two hard disks of diameter a with centers separated by a fixed distance d, may translate and rotate in the plane. We study the mixing between these qualitatively different degrees of freedom and its influence hard elastic collisions. We apply the exact collision rules for the differential offset vectors in tangent space to the computation of the Lyapunov exponents, and of time-averaged offset-vector projections into various subspaces of the phase space. For the case of a homogeneous mass distribution within a dumbbell we find that for small enough dla, depending on the density, the translational part of the Lyapunov spectrum is decoupled from the rotational part and converges to the spectrum of hard disks. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics.