Clustering-induced attraction in granular mixtures of rods and spheres
Abstract
Depletion-induced aggregation of rods enhanced by clustering is observed to produce a novel model of attractive pairs of rods separated by a line of spheres in a quasi-2D, vertically-shaken, granular gas of rods and spheres. We show that the stability of these peculiar granular aggregates increases as a function of shaking intensity. Velocity distributions of spheres inside and outside of a pair of rods trapping a line of spheres show a clear suppression of the momentum acquired by the trapped spheres. The condensed phase formed between the rods is caused by a clustering instability of the trapped spheres, enhanced by a vertical guidance produced by the confining rods. The liberated area corresponding to direct excluded-volume pairs and indirect depletion-aggregated pairs is measured as a function of time. The stability of rod pairs mediated by spheres reveals an attraction comparable in strength to the one purely induced by depletion forces.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1212.3202,
title = {Clustering-induced attraction in granular mixtures of rods and spheres},
author = {Gustavo M. Rodríguez-Liñán and Yuri Nahmad-Molinari and Gabriel Pérez-Ángel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.3202},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
9 pages, 6 figures