No Arabic abstract
More than 30 years ago Edwards and co-authors proposed a model to describe the statistics of granular packings by an ensemble of equiprobable jammed states. Experimental tests of this model remained scarce so far. We introduce a simple system to analyze statistical properties of jammed granular ensembles to test Edwards theory. Identical spheres packed in a nearly two-dimensional geometrical confinement were studied in experiments and numerical simulations. When tapped, the system evolves towards a ground state, but due to incompatible domain structures it gets trapped. Analytical calculations reproduce relatively well our simulation results, which allows us to test Edwards theory on a coupled system of two subsystems with different properties. We find that the joint system can only be described by the Edwards theory if considered as a single system due to the constraints in the stresses. The results show counterintuitive effects as in the coupled system the change in the order parameter is opposite to what is expected from the change in the compactivity.
The impacts of granular jets for both frictional and frictionless grains in two dimensions are numerically investigated. A dense flow with a dead zone emerges during the impact. From our two-dimensional simulation, we evaluate the equations of state and the con- stitutive equations of the flow. The asymptotic divergences of pressure and shear stress similar to the situation near the jamming transition appear for the frictionless case, while their exponents are smaller than those of the sheared granular systems, and are close to the extrapolation from the kinetic theoretical regime. In a similar manner to the jam- ming for frictional grains, the critical density decreases as the friction constant of grains increases. For bi-disperse systems, the effective friction constant defined as the ratio of shear stress to normal stress, monotonically increases from near zero, as the strain rate increases. On the other hand, the effective friction constant has two metastable branches for mono-disperse systems because of the coexistence of a crystallized state and a liquid state.
We review a few representative examples of granular experiments or models where phase separation, accompanied by domain coarsening, is a relevant phenomenon. We first elucidate the intrinsic non-equilibrium, or athermal, nature of granular media. Thereafter, dilute systems, the so-called granular gases are discussed: idealized kinetic models, such as the gas of inelastic hard spheres in the cooling regime, are the optimal playground to study the slow growth of correlated structures, e.g. shear patterns, vortices and clusters. In fluidized experiments, liquid-gas or solid-gas separations have been observed. In the case of monolayers of particles, phase coexistence and coarsening appear in several different setups, with mechanical or electrostatic energy input. Phenomenological models describe, even quantitatively, several experimental measures, both for the coarsening dynamics and for the dynamic transition between different granular phases. The origin of the underlying bistability is in general related to negative compressibility from granular hydrodynamics computations, even if the understanding of the mechanism is far from complete. A relevant problem, with important industrial applications, is related to the demixing or segregation of mixtures, for instance in rotating tumblers or on horizontally vibrated plates. Finally, the problem of compaction of highly dense granular materials, which has many important applications, is usually described in terms of coarsening dynamics: there, bubbles of mis-aligned grains evaporate, allowing the coalescence of optimally arranged islands and a progressive reduction of total occupied volume.
The mechanical and transport properties of jammed materials originate from an underlying per- colating network of contact forces between the grains. Using extensive simulations we investigate the force-percolation transition of this network, where two particles are considered as linked if their interparticle force overcomes a threshold. We show that this transition belongs to the random percolation universality class, thus ruling out the existence of long-range correlations between the forces. Through a combined size and pressure scaling for the percolative quantities, we show that the continuous force percolation transition evolves into the discontinuous jamming transition in the zero pressure limit, as the size of the critical region scales with the pressure.
The terminology granular matter refers to systems with a large number of hard objects (grains) of mesoscopic size ranging from millimeters to meters. Geological examples include desert sand and the rocks of a landslide. But the scope of such systems is much broader, including powders and snow, edible products such a seeds and salt, medical products like pills, and extraterrestrial systems such as the surface regolith of Mars and the rings of Saturn. The importance of a fundamental understanding for granular matter properties can hardly be overestimated. Practical issues of current concern range from disaster mitigation of avalanches and explosions of grain silos to immense economic consequences within the pharmaceutical industry. In addition, they are of academic and conceptual importance as well as examples of systems far from equilibrium. Under many conditions of interest, granular matter flows like a normal fluid. In the latter case such flows are accurately described by the equations of hydrodynamics. Attention is focused here on the possibility for a corresponding hydrodynamic description of granular flows. The tools of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, developed over the past fifty years for fluids composed of atoms and molecules, are applied here to a system of grains for a fundamental approach to both qualitative questions and practical quantitative predictions. The nonlinear Navier-Stokes equations and expressions for the associated transport coefficients are obtained.
Recent experiments (G. Ariel, et al., Nature Comm. 6, 8396 (2015)) revealed an intriguing behavior of swarming bacteria: they fundamentally change their collective motion from simple diffusion into a superdiffusive L{e}vy walk dynamics. We introduce a nonlinear non-Markovian persistent random walk model that explains the emergence of superdiffusive L{e}vy walks. We show that the alignment interaction between individuals can lead to the superdiffusive growth of the mean squared displacement and the power law distribution of run length with infinite variance. The main result is that the superdiffusive behavior emerges as a nonlinear collective phenomenon, rather than due to the standard assumption of the power law distribution of run distances from the inception. At the same time, we find that the repulsion/collision effects lead to the density dependent exponential tempering of power law distributions. This qualitatively explains experimentally observed transition from superdiffusion to the diffusion of mussels as their density increases (M. de Jager et al., Proc. R. Soc. B 281, 20132605 (2014)).