Coagulation, diffusion and the continuous Smoluchowski equation

The Smoluchowski equations are a system of partial differential equations modelling the diffusion and binary coagulation of a large collection of tiny particles. The mass parameter may be indexed either by positive integers or by positive reals, these corresponding to the discrete or the continuous form of the equations. For dimension d ≥ 3 , we derive the continuous Smoluchowski PDE as a kinetic limit of a microscopic model of Brownian particles liable to coalesce, using a method similar to that used to derive the discrete form of the equations in [A. Hammond, F. Rezakhanlou, The kinetic limit of a system of coagulating Brownian particles, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 185 (2007) 1–67]. The principal innovation is a correlation-type bound on particle locations that permits the derivation in the continuous context while simplifying the arguments of the cited work. We also comment on the scaling satisfied by the continuous Smoluchowski PDE, and its potential implications for blow-up of solutions of the equations.