Kinetics and hybrid kinetic-fluid models for nonequilibrium gas and plasmas

For a few decades, the application of the physics of plasmas has appeared in different fields like laser-matter interaction, astrophysics or thermonuclear fusion. In this thesis, we are interested in the modeling and the numerical study of nonequilibrium gas and plasmas. To describe such systems, two ways are usually used: the fluid description and the kinetic description. When we study a nonequilibrium system, fluid models are not sufficient and a kinetic description have to be used. However, solving a kinetic model requires the discretization of a large number of variables, which is quite expensive from a numerical point of view. The aim of this work is to propose a hybrid kinetic-fluid model thanks to a domain decomposition method in the velocity space. The derivation of the hybrid model is done in two different contexts: the rarefied gas context and the more complicated plasmas context. The derivation partly relies on Levermore's entropy minimization approach. The so-obtained model is then discretized and validated on various numerical test cases. In a second stage, a numerical study of a fully kinetic model is presented. A collisional plasma constituted of electrons and ions is considered through the Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck-Landau equation. Then, a numerical scheme which preserves total mass and total energy is presented. This discretization permits in particular a numerical study of the Landau damping. (author)