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Granular materials -- aggregates of many discrete, disconnected solid particles -- are ubiquitous in natural and industrial settings. Predictive models for their behavior have wide ranging applications, e.g. in defense, mining,…
Granular media such as sand and sugar are ubiquitous in nature and industry but are less well understood than fluids or solids. We consider the behavior of rapid granular flows where the transfer of momenta by collisions dominates. The…
Granular materials, composed of discrete solid grains, can be modeled as simple mechanical systems. However, these materials can undergo spontaneous slow deformation, or creep, even under small forces and while in apparent mechanical…
Anyone who has built a sandcastle recognizes that the addition of liquid to granular materials increases their stability. However, measurements of this increased stability often conflict with theory and with each other [1-7]. A…
Cohesive granular materials, like wet sand, retain their shape before yielding under stress. This solid-like behavior is associated with elasticity. As the loading increases, the material typically flows. However, cohesive materials can…
Several mechanisms cause a granular material to strengthen over time at low applied stress. The strength is determined from the maximum frictional force F_max experienced by a shearing plate in contact with wet or dry granular material…
Droplets splash when they impact dry, flat substrates above a critical velocity that depends on parameters such as droplet size, viscosity and air pressure. By imaging ethanol drops impacting silicone gels of different stiffnesses we show…
Softer than soft, squishy granular matter is composed of grains capable of significantly changing their shape (typically larger than 10% of deformation) without tearing or breaking. Because of the difficulty to test these materials…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and grains are omnipresent in daily life, industrial applications, and earth-science [1]. When unperturbed, they form stable structures that resemble the ones of other amorphous solids like metallic…
We investigate the sliding of objects on an inclined granular surface close to the avalanche threshold. Our experiments show that the stability is driven by the surface deformations. Heavy objects generate footprint-like deformations which…
Dry granular materials such as sand, gravel, pills, or agricultural grains, can become rigid when compressed or sheared. At low density, one can distort the shape of a container of granular material without encountering any resistance.…
Knowledge of the mechanical properties of protoplanetary and cometary matter is of key importance to better understand the activity of comets and the early stages of planet formation. The tensile strength determines the required pressure to…
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,…
Graphene extraordinary strength, stiffness and lightness have generated great expectations towards its application in flexible electronics and as mechanical reinforcement agent. However, the presence of lattice defects, unavoidable in…
Shocks in granular media, such as vertically oscillated beds, have been shown to develop instabilities. Similar jet formation has been observed in explosively dispersed granular media. Our previous work addressed this instability by…
Most granular packings possess shear moduli ($G$) that increase with the applied external pressure, and bulk moduli ($B$) that increase or remain constant with pressure. This paper presents "tessellated" granular metamaterials for which…
Droplets deform soft substrates near their contact lines. Using confocal microscopy, we measure the deformation of silicone gel substrates due to glycerol and fluorinated-oil droplets for a range of droplet radii and substrate thicknesses.…
Solids are distinguished from fluids by their ability to resist shear. In traditional solids, the resistance to shear is associated with the emergence of broken translational symmetry as exhibited by a non-uniform density pattern. In this…
Soft or weakly-consolidated sand refers to porous materials composed of particles (or grains) weakly held together to form a solid but that can be easily broken when subjected to stress. These materials do not behave as conventional…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, foams etc. are ubiquitous in our daily life, as well as in industrial and geotechnical applications. Although these disordered systems form stable structures if unperturbed, in practice they do…