Related papers: Granular media: some ideas from statistical physic…
A unified continuum-mechanical theory has been until now lacking for granular media, some believe it could not exist. Derived employing the hydrodynamic approach, GSH is such a theory, though as yet a qualitative one. The behavior being…
Granular materials exhibit a strongly nonlinear behaviour affecting the propagation of information in the medium. Dynamically self-organized strongly nonlinear solitary waves are the main information carriers in granular chains. Here we…
Molecular dynamics simulations are performed to investigate heterogeneous dynamics in amorphous glassy materials under oscillatory shear strain. We consider three-dimensional binary Lennard-Jones mixture well below the glass transition…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and grains are omnipresent in daily life, industrial applications, and earth-science [1]. When unperturbed, they form stable structures that resemble the ones of other amorphous solids like metallic…
We introduce a deductive statistical mechanics approach for granular materials which is formally built from few realistic physical assumptions. The main finding is an universal behavior for the distribution of the density fluctuations. Such…
We propose a two-dimensional geometrical model, based on the concept of geometrical frustration, conceived for the study of compaction in granular media. The dynamics exhibits an interesting inverse logarithmic law that is well known from…
The diffusion and flow of amorphous materials, such as glasses and granular materials, has resisted a simple microscopic description, analogous to defect theories for crystals. Early models were based on either gas-like inelastic collisions…
Non-cohesive granular media exhibit complex responses to sudden impact that often differ from those of ordinary solids and liquids. We investigate how this response is mediated by the presence of interstitial gas between the grains. Using…
A lattice model is presented for investigating the fluctuations in static granular materials under gravitationally induced stress. The model is similar in spirit to the scalar q-model of Coppersmith et al., but ensures balance of all…
During the past decades, notable improvements have been achieved in the understanding of static and dynamic properties of granular materials, giving rise to appealing new concepts like jamming, force chains, non-local rheology or the…
A formal derivation of linear hydrodynamics for a granular fluid is given. The linear response to small spatial perturbations of the homogeneous reference state is studied in detail using methods of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. A…
The evolution of effective force chains percolating through a compressed granular system is investigated. We performed experiments by compressing an ensemble of spherical particles in a cylindrical container monitoring the macroscopic…
Years ago Edwards proposed a thermodynamic description of dense granular matter, in which the grains (the `atoms' of the system) interact with inelastic forces. The approach is intriguing but is not justified from first principles, and…
We examine the structural relaxation of glassy materials at finite temperatures, considering the effect of activated rearrangements and long-range elastic interactions. Our three-dimensional mesoscopic relaxation model shows how the…
We suggest a simple model for the dynamics of granular particles in suspension which is suitable for an event driven algorithm, allowing to simulate $N=\mathcal{O}(10^6)$ particles or more. As a first application we consider a dense…
We apply the statistical mechanical approach based on the ``flat'' measure proposed by Edwards and coworkers to the parking lot model, a model that reproduces the main features of the phenomenology of vibrated granular materials. We first…
We analyze the steady state regime of systems interpolating between spin glasses and ferromagnets under a tapping dynamics recently introduced by analogy with the dynamics of mechanically perturbed granular media. A crossover from a second…
In 1989, Sir Sam Edwards made the visionary proposition to treat jammed granular materials using a volume ensemble of equiprobable jammed states in analogy to thermal equilibrium statistical mechanics, despite their inherent athermal…
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,…
An ensemble approach for force networks in static granular packings is developed. The framework is based on the separation of packing and force scales, together with an a-priori flat measure in the force phase space under the constraints…