Related papers: Stylolites: A review
Unstable systems of fluidized grains in a very-narrow vertical tube can auto-defluidize after some time, the settling particles forming either a glass- or crystal-like structure. We carried out experiments using different polymer spheres,…
As inkjet technology develops to produce smaller droplets, substrate features such as accidental scratches or manufacturing defects can potentially affect the outcome of printing, particularly for printed electronics where continuous tracks…
An asteroid spun up to its critical limit has unique surface mechanical properties that its gravity and the centrifugal force largely balance, creating a relaxation environment where low-energy events such as mass shedding may trigger…
Many engineering and environmental surfaces exhibit spatial heterogeneity in the spanwise direction and encompass multiple surface length scales. When the dominant spanwise length scale is on the order of the largest flow scales (e.g., the…
The sedimentation of a rigid particle near a wall in a viscous fluid has been studied numerically by many authors, but analytical solutions have been derived only for special cases such as the motion of spherical particles. In this paper…
Conditions for regolith landslides to occur on spinning, gravitating spheroidal asteroids and their aftermath are studied. These conditions are developed by application of classical granular mechanics stability analysis to the asteroid…
The efficiency of regolith production is key in understanding the properties of airless surfaces. Debris aprons, of fillets, around rocks are an ubiquitous morphology on many surfaces without atmosphere, which origin and evolution are…
Spherulites are complex polycrystalline structures that form through the self-assembly of small aggregated nanocrystals starting from a central point and growing radially outward. Despite their wide prevalence and relevance to fields…
The scaling of physical forces to the extremely low ambient gravitational acceleration regimes found on the surfaces of small asteroids is performed. Resulting from this, it is found that van der Waals cohesive forces between regolith…
All atmosphere-less planetary bodies are covered with a dust layer, the so-called regolith, which determines the optical, mechanical and thermal properties of their surface. These properties depend on the regolith material, the size…
For 3D geometries, we consider stones (modeled as convex polyhedra) subject to weathering with planar slices of random orientation and depth successively removing material, ultimately yielding smooth and round (i.e. spherical) shapes. An…
Physical understanding of the links between soil swelling, texture, structure, cracking, and sample size is of great interest for the physical understanding of many processes in the soil-air-water system and for applications in civil,…
The distributions of size and chemical composition in the regolith on airless bodies provides clues to the evolution of the solar system. Recently, the regolith on asteroid (25143) Itokawa, visited by the JAXA Hayabusa spacecraft, was…
The dissolution of rocks by rainfall commonly generates streamwise parallel channels, yet the occurrence of these natural patterns remains to be understood. Here, we report the emergence in the laboratory of a streamwise dissolution pattern…
There are three fundamental physical processes that gives rise to the morphology of a surface: deposition, surface diffusion and desorption. The characteristics of the interfaces generated by the combination of deposition and surface…
Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…
Soft elastic sheets resting on rigid surfaces develop wrinkles, rucks, and folds due to the combined influence of elasticity, gravity, and contact interactions. Despite their ubiquity, the principles governing their morphology and…
The form of the stress tensor is investigated in smooth, dense granular flows which are generated in split-bottom shear geometries. We find that, within a fluctuation fluidized spatial region, the form of the stress tensor is directly…
We investigate the formation of spiral crack patterns during the desiccation of thin layers of precipitates in contact with a substrate. This symmetry-breaking fracturing mode is found to arise naturally not from torsion forces, but from a…
Rivulets and droplets are naturally appearing shapes when small amounts of liquid are deposited on a partially wettable substrate. Here we study, by means of numerical simulations, the dewetting dynamics of a ring-rivulet on substrates with…