Related papers: Is there a Granular Potential?
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…
We introduce a theoretical model for the compaction of granular materials by discrete vibrations which is expected to hold when the intensity of vibration is low. The dynamical unit is taken to be clusters of granules that belong to the…
One goal of this paper is to discuss the classical definition of granular temperature as an extension of its thermodynamic equivalent and a useful concept which provides an important characterization of fluidized granular matter. Following…
We perform large-scale molecular dynamics simulations to study heated granular fluids in three dimensions. Granular particles dissipate their kinetic energy due to solid frictional interaction with other particles. The velocity of each…
"Granular elasticity," useful for calculating static stress distributions in granular media, is generalized by including the effects of slowly moving, deformed grains. The result is a hydrodynamic theory for granular solids that agrees well…
The statistical-physical study of granular matter is essential to understand, from a fundamental point of view, the many different phenomena emerging in these classical many-body systems. Under rapid-flow conditions, granular materials…
The low-temperature equilibrial state of a system of small metal grains, embedded into insulator, is studied. We find, that the grains may be charged due to the fluctuations of the surface energy of electron gas in grains, rather than…
We probe, using a model system, elastic and kinetic energies for sheared granular materials. For large enough $P/E_y$ (pressure/Young's modulus) and $P/\rho v^2$ ($P/$kinetic energy density) elastic dominates kinetic energy, and energy…
Granular matter takes many paths to pack. Gentle compression, compaction or repetitive tapping can happen in natural and industrial processes. The path influences the packing microstructure, and thus macroscale properties, particularly for…
Discrete-element simulations are used to monitor several micro-scale characteristics within a granular material, demonstrating their convergence during loading toward the critical state, their stationarity at the critical state, and the…
Granular and nanoscale materials containing a relatively small number of constituents have been studied to discover how their properties differ from their macroscopic counterparts. These studies are designed to test how far the known…
Granular materials are defined as collections of macroscopic dissipative particles. Although these systems are ubiquitous in our lives, the nature and the causes of their non-trivial collective dynamics still remain elusive and have…
Surfaces of planets and small bodies of our Solar System are often covered by a layer of granular material that can range from a fine regolith to a gravel-like structure of varying depths. Therefore, the dynamics of granular materials are…
Granular systems confined in vertically vibrated shallow horizontal boxes (quasi two-dimensional geometry) present a liquid to solid phase transition when the frequency of the periodic forcing is increased. An effective model, where grains…
Can one construct a thermodynamics for compact, slowly moving powders and grains? A few years ago, Edwards proposed a possible step in this direction, raising the fascinating perspective that such systems have a statistical mechanics of…
In this letter, we report results on the effect of temperature variations on a granular assembly through Molecular Dynamic simulations of a 2D granular column. Periodic dilation of the grains are shown to perfectly mimic such thermal…
Polycrystalline materials can be viewed as composites of crystalline particles or grains separated from one another by thin amorphous grain boundary (GB) regions. While GB have been exhaustively investigated at low temperatures, where these…
Although density functional theory provides reliable predictions for the static properties of simple fluids under confinement, a theory of comparative accuracy for the transport coefficients has yet to emerge. Nonetheless, there is evidence…
The force network ensemble is one of the most promising statistical descriptions of granular media, with an entropy accounting for all force configurations at mechanical equilibrium consistent with some external stress. It is possible to…
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…