Related papers: An experimental test of volume-equilibration betwe…
We experimentally investigate the steady states of two granular assemblies differing in their material properties and allowed to exchange volume with each other under external agitation in the vicinity of their jamming transition. We…
By means of a simple model system, the total volume fluctuations of a tapped granular material in the steady state are studied. In the limit of a system with a large number of particles, they are found to be Gaussian distributed, and…
Granular systems can display reproducible microscopic distributions governed by a few macroscopic parameters, parallel to equilibrium statistical mechanics. Building on this analogy, Edwards' s pioneering framework proposes a volume…
Granular materials, such as sand or grain, exhibit many structural and dynamic characteristics similar to those observed in molecular systems, despite temperature playing no role in their properties. This has led to an effort to develop a…
We discuss the statistical mechanics of granular matter and derive several significant results. First, we show that, contrary to common belief, the volume and stress ensembles are inter-dependent, necessitating the use of both. We use the…
We simulate via a Discrete Element Method the tapping of a narrow column of disk under gravity. For frictionless disks, this system has a simple analytic expression for the density of states in the Edwards volume ensemble. We compare the…
More than 30 years ago Edwards and co-authors proposed a model to describe the statistics of granular packings by an ensemble of equiprobable jammed states. Experimental tests of this model remained scarce so far. We introduce a simple…
Using X-ray tomography, we experimentally investigate granular packings subject to mechanical tapping for three types of beads with different friction coefficients. We validate Edwards volume ensemble in these three-dimensional granular…
We investigate experimentally the statistics of the free volume inside bidimensional granular packings, for two different kinds of grains and two levels of compaction. With the aim to gain new insight into the statistical description of…
Formulating a statistical mechanics for granular matter remains a significant challenge, in part, due to the difficulty associated with a complete characterization of the systems under study. We present a fully characterized model of a…
Although jammed granular systems are athermal, several thermodynamic-like descriptions have been proposed which make quantitative predictions about the distribution of volume and stress within a system and provide a corresponding…
We show that intensive thermodynamic parameters associated to additive conserved quantities can be naturally defined from a statistical approach in far-from-equilibrium steady-state systems, under few assumptions, and without any detailed…
A statistical description of static granular material requires ergodic sampling of the phase space spanned by the different configurations of the particles. We periodically fluidize a column of glass beads and find that the sequence of…
A possible approach to the statistical description of granular assemblies starts from Edwards' assumption that all blocked states occupying the same volume are equally probable (S.F. Edwards, R. Oakeshott, Physica A 157, 1080 (1989)). We…
We have found a way to analyze Edwards' density of states for static granular packings in the special case of round, rigid, frictionless grains assuming constant coordination number. It obtains the most entropic density of single grain…
Using X-ray tomography, we experimentally investigate granular segregation phenomena in a mixture of particles with different densities under quasi-static cyclic shear. We quantitatively characterize their height distributions at steady…
This paper illustrates how the tools of equilibrium statistical mechanics can help to explain a far-from-equilibrium problem: the jamming transition in frictionless granular materials. Edwards ideas consist of proposing a statistical…
Granular matter is comprised of a large number of particles whose collective behavior determines macroscopic properties such as flow and mechanical strength. A comprehensive theory of the properties of granular matter, therefore, requires a…
A densely packed granular system is an example of an out-of-equilibrium system in the jammed state. It has been a longstanding problem to determine whether this class of systems can be described by concepts arising from equilibrium…
By detailed Molecular Dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations %of a realistic model we show that granular materials at rest can be described as thermodynamics systems. First we show that granular packs can be characterized by few parameters,…