Related papers: Gel-like granular materials with high durability a…
Friction plays a fundamental role in many natural processes, including earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions. Earthquakes occur when highly compressed fault surfaces accumulate large enough shear stresses, causing the faults to…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and food grains are ubiquitous in civil engineering, geoscience, agriculture, and medicine. While the influence of friction between the grains on the static structure of these systems is well…
Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature and industry; their mechanical behavior has been of academic and engineering interest for centuries. One of the reasons for their rather complex mechanical behavior is that stresses exerted on a…
Grain boundary roughness can affect electronic and mechanical properties of two-dimensional materials. This roughness depends crucially on the growth process by which the two-dimensional material is formed. To investigate the key mechanisms…
Most studies on granular physics have focused on dry granular media, with no liquids between the grains. However, in geology and many real world applications (e.g., food processing, pharmaceuticals, ceramics, civil engineering,…
The mechanics of cohesive or cemented granular materials is complex, combining the heterogeneous responses of granular media, like force chains, with clearly defined material properties. Here, we use a discrete element model (DEM)…
Solids deform and fluids flow, but soft glassy materials, such as emulsions, foams, suspensions, and pastes, exhibit an intricate mix of solid and liquid-like behavior. While much progress has been made to understand their elastic (small…
A polycrystalline solid is modelled as an ensemble of random irregular polyhedra filling the entire space occupied by the solid body, leaving no voids or flaws between them. Adjacent grains can slide with a relative velocity proportional to…
Clay, the major ingredient of natural soils, is often used as a rheological modifier while formulating paints and coatings. When subjected to desiccation, colloidal clay suspensions and clayey soils crack due to the accumulation of…
The stability of convection rolls in a fluid heated from below is limited by secondary instabilities, including the skew-varicose and crossroll instabilities. We observe a stability boundary defined by the same instabilities in stripe…
A wide range of disordered materials, from biological to geological assemblies, feature discrete elements undergoing large shape changes. How significant geometrical variations at the microscopic scale affect the response of the assembly,…
A sharp transition between liquefaction and transient solidification is observed during impact on a granular suspension depending on the initial packing fraction. We demonstrate, via high-speed pressure measurements and a two-phase…
Granular materials are involved in most industrial and environmental processes, as well as many civil engineering applications. Although significant advances have been made in understanding the statics and dynamics of cohesionless grains…
Soft materials, such as liquids, polymers, foams, gels, colloids, granular materials, and most soft biological materials, play an important role in our daily lives. From a mechanical viewpoint, soft materials can easily achieve large…
Dense granular flows are often unstable and form inhomogeneous structures. Although significant advances have been recently made in understanding simple flows, instabilities of such flows are often not understood. We present experimental…
The high occupancy rates in urban multi-story buildings, combined with present safety concerns, necessarily prompt a reassessment of performance goals. Given the notable seismic damage and instances of weak-story failures that have been…
Soft polymer-based solid materials can be defined as solid materials with elastic moduli below 1 MPa. In order to obtain such a low modulus while retaining a solid character, all these materials are based on a network of fixed points…
During an earthquake, slip occurs in a localised shear zone that features a heavily granulated fault core that can be characterised as a shear band. We study the formation of this fault core in a granular rock such as sandstone by…
If you walk on sand, it supports your weight. How do the disordered forces between particles in sand organize, to keep you from sinking? This simple question is surprisingly difficult to answer experimentally: measuring forces in three…
Granular materials undergo compaction under periodic temperature fluctuations, leading to various engineering and geological phenomena from landslides to silo compaction. Although thermal effects on granular materials have been extensively…