English

What determines static force chains in stressed granular media?

Soft Condensed Matter 2016-02-24 v4 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

The determination of the normal and transverse (frictional) inter-particle forces within a granular medium is a long standing, taunting, and yet unresolved problem. We present a new formalism which employs the knowledge of the external forces and the orientations of contacts between particles (of any given sizes), to compute all the inter-particle forces. Having solved this problem we exemplify the efficacy of the formalism showing that the force chains in such systems are determined by an expansion in the eigenfunctions of a newly defined operator.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1505.06626,
  title  = {What determines static force chains in stressed granular media?},
  author = {Oleg Gendelman and Yoav G. Pollack and Itamar Procaccia and Shiladitya Sengupta and Jacques Zylberg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.06626},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

v2: Supplementary Material added with examples of the M,T and Q matrices v3&v4: Figures improved and minor modifications

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:40:49.507Z