Related papers: Geometric Origin of Macroscopic Alignment in Granu…
Granular materials, composed of discrete solid grains, can be modeled as simple mechanical systems. However, these materials can undergo spontaneous slow deformation, or creep, even under small forces and while in apparent mechanical…
Gravity-driven flows of granular matter are involved in a wide variety of situations, ranging from industrial processes to geophysical phenomena, such as avalanches or landslides. These flows are characterized by the coexistence of solid…
Granular media near jamming exhibit fascinating properties, which can be harnessed to create jammed-granulate metamaterials: materials whose characteristics arise not only from the shape and material properties of the particles at the…
We study the effect of polydispersity on the macroscopic physical properties of granular packings in two and three dimensions. A mean-field approach is developed to approximate the macroscale quantities as functions of the microscopic ones.…
We have discovered that two significant quantities within hard particle systems: the probability of successfully inserting an additional particle at random and the scale distribution function, can be connected by a concise relation. We…
The orientation of small anisotropic particles settling in a turbulent fluid determines some essential properties of the suspension. We show that the orientation distribution of small heavy spheroids settling through turbulence can be…
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,…
Amorphous packings of spheres have been intensely investigated in order to understand the mechanical and flow behaviour of dense granular matter, and to explore universal aspects of the transition from fluid to structurally arrested or…
We present a new method to transform the spectral pixel information of a micrograph into an affine geometric description, which allows us to analyze the morphology of granular materials. We use spectral and pulse-coupled neural network…
True contact between randomly rough solids consists of myriad individual micro-junctions. While their total area controls the adhesive friction force of the interface, other macroscopic features, including viscoelastic friction, wear,…
It is well known that jammed soft materials will flow if sheared above their yield stress - think mayonnaise spread on bread - but a complete microscopic description of this seemingly sim- ple process has yet to emerge. What remains elusive…
By means of contact dynamics simulations, we investigate a dense packing composed of polyhedral particles under quasistatic shearing. The effect of particle shape is analyzed by comparing the polyhedra packing with a packing of similar…
Cohesive granular materials such as wet sand, snow, and powders can flow like a viscous liquid. However, the elementary mechanisms of momentum transport in such athermal particulate fluids are elusive. As a result, existing models for…
A remarkable feature of static granular matter is the distribution of force along intricate networks. Even regular inter-particle contact networks produce wildly inhomogeneous force networks where certain "chains" of particles carry forces…
We study the transport properties of particles draining from a silo using imaging and direct particle tracking. The particle displacements show a universal transition from super-diffusion to normal diffusion, as a function of the distance…
It is plausible that the dark matter particles have non-gravitational interactions among themselves. If such self interactions are large enough, they could leave an imprint on the morphology of galaxies. These effects can be studied with…
The coupled mechanics of fluid-filled granular media controls the behavior of many natural systems such as saturated soils, fault gouge, and landslides. The grain motion and the fluid pressure influence each other: It is well established…
We coarse-grain a model of closely-packed ellipses that can vary their aspect ratio to derive continuum equations for materials comprising confluent deformable particles such as epithelial cell layers. We show that contractile nearest…
A continuum dislocation model of formation of grains whose boundaries have a non-vanishing thickness is proposed. For a single crystal deforming in simple shear the lamellar structure of grains with thin layers containing dislocations as…
Considerable recent attention has been given to the study of shape formation using modern responsive materials that can be preprogrammed to undergo spatially inhomogeneous local deformations. In particular, nematic liquid crystal polymer…