Velocity Distribution and the Effect of Wall Roughness in Granular Poiseuille Flow

From event-driven simulations of a gravity-driven channel flow of inelastic hard-disks, we show that the velocity distribution function remains close to a Gaussian for a wide range densities (even when the Knudsen number is of order one) if the walls are smooth and the particle collisions are nearly elastic. For dense flows, a transition from a Gaussian to a power-law distribution for the high velocity tails occurs with increasing dissipation in the center of the channel, irrespective of wall-roughness. For a rough wall, the near-wall distribution functions are distinctly different from those in the bulk even in the quasielastic limit.