Related papers: What is in a pebble shape?
The shapes of flat pebbles may be characterized in terms of the statistical distribution of curvatures measured along their contours. We illustrate this new method for clay pebbles eroded in a controlled laboratory apparatus, and also for…
We report on the erosion of flat linoleum "pebbles" under steady rotation in a slurry of abrasive grit. To quantify shape as a function of time, we develop a general method in which the pebble is photographed from multiple angles with…
Among pebbles strewn across a sandy ocean beach one can find relatively many with a nearly perfect elliptical (ellipsoidal) shape, and one wonders how this shape was attained and whether, during abrasion, the pebbles would remain elliptical…
We propose a mathematical model which suggests that the two main geological observations about shingle beaches, i.e. the emergence of predominant pebble size ratios and strong segregation by size are interrelated. Our model is a based on a…
Shells, when confined, can deform in a broad assortment of shapes and patterns, often quite dissimilar to what is produced by their flat counterparts (plates). In this work we discuss the morphological landscape of shells deposited on a…
Pebble accretion refers to the growth of planetary bodies through the accretion of pebble-sized particles. Pebbles are defined in terms of their aerodynamically size $\tau_s$, which describes the level of coupling to the disk gas.…
In the present work we focus on the morphology of well abraded, almost perfectly ellipsoidal natural pebbles. Flat, oblate and prolate ellipsoidal pebbles are expected to be characterized by qualitatively different shape evolution due to…
Three particles floating on a fluid surface define a triangle. The aim of this paper is to characterise the shape of the triangle, defined by two of its angles, as the three vertices are subject to a complex or turbulent motion. We consider…
We report here on a laboratory-scale experiment which reproduces a rich variety of natural patterns with few control parameters. In particular, we focus on intriguing rhomboid structures often found on sandy shores and flats. We show that…
This article introduces a new geophysical theory, in the form of a single simple partial integro-differential equation, to explain how frictional abrasion alone of a stone on a planar beach can lead to the oval shapes observed empirically.…
River-bed sediments display two universal downstream trends: fining, in which particle size decreases; and rounding, where pebble shapes evolve toward ellipsoids. Rounding is known to result from transport-induced abrasion; however many…
A simple model is presented for the formation of rolling grain ripples on a flat sand bed by the oscillatory flow generated by a surface wave. An equation of motion is derived for the individual ripples, seen as "particles", on the…
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izbGXdjvK_I for a YouTube video showing part of the results in this paper.We will consider surfaces whose mean curvature at a point is a linear function of the square of the distance from that point to the…
A new equation is proposed to explain the curvature of spent sparklers. We found the state of a segment of the sparkler to depend strongly on the state of its spent segments. The equation is nearly able to produce the sparkler shape for a…
Various substances in the liquid state tend to form droplets. In this paper the shape of such droplets is investigated within the spherical model of a lattice gas. We show that in this case the droplet boundary is always diffusive, as…
We propose a geometrically motivated mathematical model which reveals the key features of coastal and fluvial fragment shape evolution from the earliest stages of the abrasion. Our \textit{collisional polygon model} governs the evolution…
We characterize the kinematics of bubbles in a sheared two-dimensional foam using statistical measures. We consider the distributions of both bubble velocities and displacements. The results are discussed in the context of the expected…
This study investigates the interaction of a shock wave with a fixed layer of particles in cylindrical geometries using particle-resolved large eddy simulations. The curvature radius of the particle layer is varied and the resulting flow…
Distributions of wave characteristics of ocean waves, such as wave slope, waveheight or wavelength, are an important tool in a variety of oceanographic applications such as safety of ocean structures or in the study of ship stability, as…
Non-spherical emulsion droplets can be stabilized by densely packed colloidal particles adsorbed at their surface. In order to understand the microstructure of these surface packings, the ordering of hard spheres on ellipsoidal surfaces is…