Related papers: Air drag controls the runout of small laboratory l…
Meandering instability is familiar to everyone through river meandering or small rivulets of rain flowing down a windshield. However, its physical understanding is still premature, although it could inspire researchers in various fields,…
Reliably predicting the geomorphology and climate of planetary bodies requires knowledge of the dynamic threshold wind shear velocity below which saltation transport ceases. Here we measure this threshold in a wind tunnel for four…
Basal effects have important implications for the high mobility and long runout of granular flows such as rock avalanches and landslides. However, fundamental understanding of the basal effect in granular flows remains challenging due to…
The dynamics of a hollow cylinder containing granules and rolling down an inclined plane was investigated. A theoretical approach for investigating the behaviour of such a cylinder was proposed. The critical angle of the plane that allows…
In nature, submarine slope failures usually carry thousands of cubic-meters of sediments across extremely long distances and cause tsunamis and damages to offshore structures. This paper uses the granular column collapse experiment to…
Velocity fluctuations of grains flowing down a rough inclined plane are experimentally studied. The grains at the free surface exhibit fluctuating motions, which are correlated over few grains diameters. The characteristic correlation…
Laboratory earthquakes exhibit characteristics of a low dimensional random attractor with a dimension similar to that of natural slow earthquakes. A model of stochastic differential equations based on rate and state-dependent friction…
We have studied the splashing dynamics of water drops impacting granular layers. Depending on the drop kinetic energy, various shapes are observed for the resulting craters. Experimental parameters that have been considered are : the size…
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…
We study fluctuations in the drag force experienced by an object moving through a granular medium. The successive formation and collapse of jammed states give a stick-slip nature to the fluctuations which are periodic at small depths but…
The aim of this paper is to propose a 2D computational algorithm for modeling of the trigger and the propagation of shallow landslides caused by rainfall. We used a Molecular Dynamics (MD) inspired model, similar to discrete element method…
An X-ray imaging technique is used to probe the stability of 3-dimensional granular packs in a slowly rotating drum. Well before the surface reaches the avalanche angle, we observe intermittent plastic events associated with collective…
For the 2007 International Forum on Landslide Disaster Management framework, our team performed several numerical simulations on both theoretical and natural cases of granular flows. The objective was to figure out the ability and the…
This work summarizes a series of studies on two-dimensional granular impact, where an intruding object strikes a granular material at high speed. Many previous studies on granular impact have used a macroscopic force law, which is dominated…
The entrainment of underlying erodible material by geophysical flows can significantly boost the flowing mass and increase the final deposition extent. The particle size of both the flowing material and the erodible substrate influence the…
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…
The linear stability analysis of the equations governing the evolution of a flat sand bed submitted to a turbulent shear flow predicts that the wavelength $\lambda$ at which the bed destabilises to form dunes should scale with the drag…
Farmed landscapes provide a natural laboratory to test how management reshapes near-surface hydrodynamics. Combining distributed acoustic sensing with physics-based hydromechanical modeling, we tracked minute-resolution, meter-scale changes…
While experiencing atmospheric turbulence on a commercial flight can be uncomfortable, it rarely compromises the stability of the aircraft. The situation is quite different for small air vehicles that operate in urban canyons, around…
When an object impacts onto a bed of very loose, fine sand, the drag it experiences depends on the ambient pressure in a surprising way: Drag is found to increase significantly with decreasing pressure. We use a modified penetrometer…