Related papers: Anomalous Creep as a Precursor to Failure in Granu…
We study the creep behavior of a disordered brittle material (concrete) under successive loading steps, using acoustic emission and ultrasonic sensing to track internal damage. The primary creep rate is observed to follow a (Omori-type)…
Packings of macroscopic granular chains capture some of the essential aspects of molecular polymer systems and have been suggested as a paradigm to understand the physics on a molecular scale. However, here we demonstrate that the…
The terminology granular matter refers to systems with a large number of hard objects (grains) of mesoscopic size ranging from millimeters to meters. Geological examples include desert sand and the rocks of a landslide. But the scope of…
Upon mechanical loading, granular materials yield and undergo plastic deformation. The nature of plastic deformation is essential for the development of the macroscopic constitutive models and the understanding of shear band formation.…
Wet granular aggregates are common precursors of construction materials, food, and health care products. The physical mechanisms involved in the mixing of dry grains with a wet substrate are not well understood and difficult to control.…
Crack growth is the basic mechanism leading to the failure of brittle materials. Engineering addresses this problem within the framework of continuum mechanics, which links deterministically the crack motion to the applied loading. Such an…
We propose a theory of shear flow in dense granular materials. A key ingredient of the theory is an effective temperature that determines how the material responds to external driving forces such as shear stresses and vibrations. We show…
Granular materials are known to separate by size under a variety of circumstances. Experiments presented here and elucidated by modeling and MD simulation document a new segregation mechanism, namely segregation by friction. The experiments…
Atomic crystals with dislocations deform plastically at low stresses via dislocation glide. Whether dislocation glide occurs in macroscopic frictional granular media has remained unknown. The discrete element method is employed to simulate…
We present creep experiments on fiber composite materials with controlled heterogeneity. Recorded strain rates and acoustic emission rates exhibit a power law relaxation in the primary creep regime (Andrade law) followed by a power law…
Here we theoretically and computationally study the frequency dependence of phase speed and attenuation for marine sediments from the perspective of granular mechanics. We leverage recent theoretical insights from the granular physics…
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…
Stress paths in granular matter often suffer sudden large-scale rearrangements when the system is slightly perturbed, i.e. granular systems are unstable. We show in this paper that the observed instability is due to the minimally rigid, or…
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…
Granulate physics has made considerable progress during the past decades in the understanding of static and dynamic properties of large ensembles of interacting macroscopic particles, including the modeling of phenomena like jamming,…
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)…
Quasi-brittle materials endowed with (statistically) self-similar hierarcical microstructures show distinct failure patterns that deviate from the standard scenario of damage accumulation followed by crack nucleation-and-growth. Here we…
Spontaneous stratification in granular mixtures has been recently reported by H. A. Makse et al. [Nature 386, 379 (1997)]. Here we study experimentally the dynamical processes leading to spontaneous stratification. Using a high-speed video…
Ductile compaction is common in many natural systems, but the temporal evolution of such systems is rarely studied. We observe surprising oscillations in the weight measured at the bottom of a self-compacting ensemble of ductile grains. The…
A loosely packed bed of sand sits precariously on the fence between mechanically stable and flowing states. This has especially strong implications for animals or vehicles needing to navigate sandy environments, which can sink and become…