Related papers: Anomalous Creep as a Precursor to Failure in Granu…
When a mixture of two kinds of grains differing in size and shape is poured in a vertical two-dimensional cell, the mixture spontaneously stratifies in alternating layers of small and large grains, whenever the large grains are more faceted…
Granular heaps are critical in both industrial applications and natural processes, exhibiting complex behaviors that have sparked significant research interest. The stress dip phenomenon observed beneath granular heaps continues to be a…
Solid polycrystalline materials undergoing diffusion creep are usually described by Cauchy continuum models with a Newtonian viscous rheology dependent on the grain size. Such a continuum lacks the rotational degrees of freedom needed to…
We investigate the dynamic evolution of jamming in granular media through fluctuations in the granular drag force. The successive collapse and formation of jammed states give a stick-slip nature to the fluctuations which is independent of…
Volume alteration in solid materials is a common cause of material failure. Here we investigate the crack formation in thin elastic layers attached to a substrate. We show that small variations in the volume contraction and substrate…
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…
Granulation is a ubiquitous process crucial for many products ranging from food and care products to pharmaceuticals. Granulation is the process in which a powder is mixed with a small amount of liquid (binder) to form solid agglomerates…
Some remarkable generic properties, related to isostaticity and potential energy minimization, of equilibrium configurations of assemblies of rigid, frictionless grains are studied. Isostaticity -the uniqueness of the forces, once the list…
Crystalline materials deform in an intermittent way via dislocation-slip avalanches. Below a critical stress, the dislocations are jammed within their glide plane due to long-range elastic interactions and the material exhibits plastic…
Granular materials are inherently out-of-equilibrium systems due to energy dissipation through inelastic collisions and friction. When driven by mechanical agitation such as vibration, they exhibit rich collective behaviors including…
The paper develops the stiffness relationship between the movements and forces among a system of discrete interacting grains. The approach is similar to that used in structural analysis, but the stiffness matrix of granular material is…
Granular materials react to shear stresses differently than do ordinary fluids. Rather than deforming uniformly, materials such as dry sand or cohesionless powders develop shear bands: narrow zones containing large relative particle motion…
Dense granular materials and other particle aggregates transmit stress in a manner that belies their microstructural disorder. A subset of the particle contact network is strikingly coherent, wherein contacts are aligned nearly linearly and…
Numerical simulations of assemblies of grains under cyclic loading exhibit ``granular ratcheting'': a small net deformation occurs with each cycle, leading to a linear accumulation of deformation with cycle number. We show that this is due…
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…
Seismogenic plate boundaries are presumed to behave in a similar manner to a densely packed granular medium, where fault and blocks systems rapidly rearrange the distribution of forces within themselves, as particles do in slowly sheared…
The ability of grains to rotate can play a crucial role on the collective behavior of granular media. It has been observed in computer simulations that imposing a torque at the contacts modifies the force chains, making support chains less…
We investigate experimentally the dynamics of an intruder dragged by a constant force in an assembly of horizontally vibrated grains close to jamming. At moderate packing fractions, the intruder moves rapidly as soon as the force is…
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,…
For two decades now, the importance of microstructure in the mechanical behaviour of a large collection of grains has been a topic of intense research. Many approaches have been developed to study the microstructure in granular materials,…