Related papers: Signatures of granular microstructure in dense she…
The occurence of shear bands in a complex fluid is generally understood as resulting from a structural evolution of the material under shear, which leads (from a theoretical perspective) to a non-monotonic stationnary flow curve related to…
One long-lasting puzzle in amorphous solids is shear localization, where local plastic deformation involves cooperative particle rearrangements in small regions of a few inter-particle distances, self-organizing into shear bands and…
Dry granular materials such as sand, gravel, pills, or agricultural grains, can become rigid when compressed or sheared. At low density, one can distort the shape of a container of granular material without encountering any resistance.…
One prototypical instability in granular flows is the shear-banding instability, in which a uniform granular shear flow breaks into alternating bands of dense and dilute clusters of particles having low and high shear (shear stress or shear…
A continuum description of granular flows would be of considerable help in predicting natural geophysical hazards or in designing industrial processes. However, the constitutive equations for dry granular flows, which govern how the…
Slow and dense granular flows often exhibit narrow shear bands, making them ill-suited for a continuum description. However, smooth granular flows have been shown to occur in specific geometries such as linear shear in the absence of…
The evolution of wide shear zones (or shear bands) was investigated experimentally and numerically for quasistatic dry granular flows in split bottom shear cells. We compare the behavior of materials consisting of beads, irregular grains…
Granular flows during a shear-induced mixing process are studied using Discrete Element Methods. The aim is to understand the underlying elementary mechanisms of transition from unmixed to mixed phases for a granular material featuring a…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, foams etc. are ubiquitous in our daily life, as well as in industrial and geotechnical applications. Although these disordered systems form stable structures if unperturbed, in practice they do…
Computer simulations of sheared granular fluids, modeled as inelastic hard spheres, are presented which show signs of a uniquely three-dimensional instabilty. In the stable regime, a linear velocity profile, $v_{x}=ay$, with shear rate $a$…
Shear strain localization into shear bands is associated with velocity weakening instabilities and earthquakes. Here, we simulate steady-state plane-shear flow of numerical granular material (gouge), confined between parallel surfaces. Both…
We investigate the flow properties of a two-dimensional aqueous foam submitted to a quasistatic shear in a Couette geometry. A strong localization of the flow (shear banding) at the edge of the moving wall is evidenced, characterized by an…
Prediction of flow profiles of slowly sheared granular materials is a major geophysical and industrial challenge. Understanding the role of gravity is particularly important for future planetary exploration in varying gravitational…
We analyse the flow curves of a two-dimensional assembly of granular particles which are interacting via frictional contact forces. For packing fractions slightly below jamming, the fluid undergoes a large scale instability, implying a…
We report experiments on slow granular flows in a split-bottom Couette cell that show novel strain localization features. Nontrivial flow profiles have been observed which are shown to be the consequence of simultaneous formation of shear…
Diffusivity is a key quantity in describing velocity fluctuations in granular materials. These fluctuations are the basis of many thermodynamic and hydrodynamic models which aim to provide a statistical description of granular systems. We…
In a realistic three-dimensional setup, we simulate the slow deformation of idealized granular media composed of spheres undergoing an axisymmetric triaxial shear test. We follow the self-organization of the spontaneous strain localization…
The shear strength of cohesionless granular materials is generally attributed to the compactness or anisotropy of their microstructure. An open issue is how such compact or anisotropic microstructures, and thus the shear strength, depend on…
A two-dimensional lattice model for the formation and evolution of shear bands in granular media is proposed. Each lattice site is assigned a random variable which reflects the local density. At every time step, the strain is localized…
Entangled granular systems exhibit mechanical rigidity and resistance to deformation, reminiscent of cohesive materials, due to their reduced degrees of freedom and contact friction. A quantitative understanding of how classical granular…