Related papers: Is there a Granular Potential?
The compaction dynamics of a granular media subject to a sequence of vertical taps made of fluid pulses is investigated via Molecular Dynamics simulations. Our study focuses on three different levels: macroscopic (volume fraction),…
Granular materials are complex multi-particle ensembles in which macroscopic properties are largely determined by inter-particle interactions between their numerous constituents. In order to understand and to predict their macroscopic…
Recent experimental results on the static or quasistatic response of granular materials have been interpreted to suggest the inapplicability of the traditional engineering approaches, which are based on elasto-plastic models (which are…
Granular material is showing very often in geotechnical engineering, petroleum engineering, material science and physics. The packings of the granular material play a very important role in their mechanical behaviors, such as stress-strain…
Years ago Edwards proposed a thermodynamic description of dense granular matter, in which the grains (the `atoms' of the system) interact with inelastic forces. The approach is intriguing but is not justified from first principles, and…
In this paper, we recall various features of non equilibrium granular systems. Clusters with specific properties are found depending on the packing density, going from loose (a granular gas) to sintered (though brittle) polycrystalline…
These lecture notes cover the statics and glassy dynamics of granular media. Most of the lectures were in fact devoted to `force propagation' models. We discuss the experimental and theoretical motivations for these approaches, and their…
As a fragile construction, a granular pile is very sensitive to minute external perturbations. In particular, it is now well established that a granular assembly is sensitive to variations of temperature. Such variations can produce…
At the core of equilibrium statistical mechanics lies the notion of statistical ensembles: a collection of microstates, each occurring with a given a priori probability that depends only on a few macroscopic parameters such as temperature,…
We introduce a deductive statistical mechanics approach for granular materials which is formally built from few realistic physical assumptions. The main finding is an universal behavior for the distribution of the density fluctuations. Such…
We study the compaction and mobility properties of a dense granular material under weak random vibration. By putting in direct contact millimetric glass beads with piezoelectric transducers we manage to inject energy to the system in a…
A granular metal is an array of metallic nano-particles imbedded into an insulating matrix. Tuning the intergranular coupling strength a granular system can be transformed into either a good metal or an insulator and, in case of…
Granular materials present memory effects when submitted to tapping processes. These effects have been observed experimentally and are discussed here in the context of a general kind of model systems for compaction formulated at a…
Elastic and dissipative properties of granular assemblies under uniaxial compression are studied both experimentally and by numerical simulations. Following a novel compaction procedure at varying oscillatory pressures, the stress response…
A method has been found to analyze Edwards' granular contact force probability functional for a special case. As a result, the granular contact force probability density functions are obtained from first principles for this case. The…
Granular materials are ubiquitous in our daily lives. While they have been a subject of intensive engineering research for centuries, in the last decade granular matter attracted significant attention of physicists. Yet despite a major…
Granular segregation is ubiquitous in industrial, geological or daily-life context, but there is still no unifying theoretical approach. In this review, we examine two examples of granular segregation -- shallow rapid flows and rotating…
A scenario for systems with slow dynamics is characterised by stating that there are several temperatures coexisting in the sample, with a single temperature shared by all observables at each (widely separate) time-scale. In preparation for…
In clouds of suspended particles (grains, droplets, spheres, crystals, etc.), collisions electrify the particles and the clouds, producing large electric potential differences over large scales. This is seen most spectacularly in the…
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…