A granular fluid modeled as a driven system of elastic hard spheres

We explore the possibility of describing the main transport properties of a granular gas by means of a model consisting of elastic hard spheres under the action of a drag force that mimics the inelastic cooling of the granular gas. Direct Monte Carlo simulations of the Boltzmann equation show a good agreement between the results for a gas of inelastic hard spheres and those for a gas of driven elastic hard spheres in the simple shear flow state. This approximate equivalence between both systems is exploited to extend known kinetic models for elastic collisions to the inelastic case.