Abstract

The phenomenon of heat conduction in a two-dimensional gas of N hard disks is studied in the hydrostatic regime by means of nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (N ranging from 100 to 8000). For systems with N ? 1500 the temperature and density profiles observed are in excellent agreement with the continuous theory, but the conductivity k differs from the one derived from Enskog's theory in a systematic way. This difference seems to slowly decrease with increasing density.