English

Influence of Roughness on Granular Avalanches

Soft Condensed Matter 2021-07-30 v1 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks

Abstract

Combining X-ray tomography with simultaneous shear force measurement, we investigate shear-induced granular avalanches using spherical particles with different surface roughness. We find that systems consisting of particles with large surface roughness display quasi-periodic avalanches interrupted by crackling-like small ones. In contrast, systems consisting of particles with small roughness display no detectable avalanches. The stress drop of quasi-periodic avalanche shows a linear relation with the correlation length of particle non-affine displacement, suggesting that roughness enhances inter-particle locking and hence particle-level dynamic correlation length. However, the nonaffine displacement is two orders of magnitude smaller than particle size, indicating that stress is mainly released on the length scale of roughness. The correlation length of non-affine displacements abruptly increases when a quasi-periodic avalanche occurs, suggesting that quasi-periodic avalanches can be interpreted as a spinodal nucleation event in a first-order phase transition.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2107.13927,
  title  = {Influence of Roughness on Granular Avalanches},
  author = {Jie Zheng and Yi Xing and Ye Yuan and Zhifeng Li and Zhikun Zeng and Shuyang Zhang and Houfei Yuan and Hua Tong and Chengjie Xia and Walter Kob and Xiaoping Jia and Jie Zhang and Yujie Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.13927},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

22 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T04:38:37.264Z