Related papers: Force chains bias the dynamic response to impacts …
Fracture toughness is the material property characterizing resistance to failure. Predicting its value from the solid structure at the atomistic scale remains elusive, even in the simplest situations of brittle fracture. We report here…
Robustness of spatial pattern against perturbations is an indispensable property of developmental processes for organisms, which need to adapt to changing environments. Although specific mechanisms for this robustness have been extensively…
The evolution of a pile of granular material is investigated by molecular dynamics using a new model including nonsphericity of the particles instead of introducing static friction terms. The angle of repose of the piles as well as the…
We quantitatively investigate how collisional avalanches may developin debris discs as the result of the initial break-up of a planetesimal or comet-like object, triggering a collisional chain reaction due to outward escaping small dust…
This paper presents two main results. The first result indicates that in materials with broadly distributed microscopic heterogeneities, the fracture strength distribution corresponding to the peak load of the material response does not…
The influence of controlled vibrations on the granular rheology is investigated in a specifically designed experiment. We study experimentally a thin granular film spreading under the action of horizontal vibrations. A nonlinear diffusion…
Tidal dissipation in a celestial body can be used to probe its internal structure. Tides govern the orbital evolution of binary systems and therefore constraints on the interior of binary system members can be derived by knowing the age and…
Fracture propagation is highly sensitive to the conditions at the crack tip. In heterogeneous materials, microscale obstacles can cause propagation instabilities. Macroscopic heterogeneities modify the stress field over scales larger than…
Planetary systems can evolve dynamically even after the planets themselves have fully formed, and there is circumstantial evidence that most planetary systems become unstable after the disappearance of the gaseous protoplanetary disk.…
Experiments on the low-speed impact of solid objects into granular media have been used both to mimic geophysical events and to probe the unusual nature of the granular state of matter. Observations have been interpreted in terms of…
Global scale impacts modify the physical or thermal state of a substantial fraction of a target asteroid. Specific effects include accretion, family formation, reshaping, mixing and layering, shock and frictional heating, fragmentation,…
We study a model of ``organized'' criticality, where a single avalanche propagates through an \textit{a priori} static (i.e., organized) sandpile configuration. The latter is chosen according to an i.i.d. distribution from a Borel…
The extremely weak gravity on small bodies makes landers prone to rebound and uncontrolled drift. To mitigate this, the Hayabusa2 mission employed a particle-filled flexible shell, but the coupled dynamics of shell deformation and internal…
We report an experimental study of the statistical properties of vibrated granular rings. In this system, a linked rod and bead metallic chain in the form of a ring is collisionally excited by a vertically oscillating plate. The dynamics…
Force chains form heterogeneous physical structures that can constrain the mechanical stability and acoustic transmission of granular media. However, despite their relevance for predicting bulk properties of materials, there is no agreement…
Elastic wave propagation provides a noninvasive way to probe granular materials. The discrete element method using particle configuration as input, allows a micromechanical interpretation on the acoustic response of a given granular system.…
Asteroid families form as a result of large-scale collisions among main belt asteroids. The orbital distribution of fragments after a family-forming impact could inform us about their ejection velocities. Unfortunately, however, orbits…
It is likely that most protostellar systems undergo a brief phase where the protostellar disc is self-gravitating. If these discs are prone to fragmentation, then they are able to rapidly form objects that are initially of several Jupiter…
We present a continuum model for the propagation of cracks and fractures in brittle materials. The components of the strain tensor $\epsilon$ are the fundamental variables. The evolution equations are based on a free energy that reduces to…
Knowledge of the interior density distribution of an asteroid can reveal its composition and constrain its evolutionary history. However, most asteroid observational techniques are not sensitive to interior properties. We investigate the…