No Arabic abstract
We investigate how the kinetic energy acquired by a dense granular system driven by an external vibration depends on the input energy. Our focus is on the dependence of the granular behavior on two main parameters: frequency and vibration amplitude. We find that there exists an optimal forcing frequency, at which the system reaches the maximal kinetic energy: if the input energy is increased beyond such a threshold, the system dissipates more and more energy and recovers a colder and more viscous state. Quite surprisingly, the nonmonotonic behavior is found for vibration amplitudes which are sufficiently small to keep the system always in contact with the driving oscillating plate. Studying dissipative properties of the system, we unveil a striking difference between this nonmonotonic behavior and a standard resonance mechanism. This feature is also observed at the microscopic scale of the single-grain dynamics and can be interpreted as an instance of negative specific heat. An analytically solvable model based on a generalized forced-damped oscillator well reproduces the observed phenomenology, illustrating the role of the competing effects of forcing and dissipation.
We experimentally investigate the energy dissipation rate in sinusoidally driven boxes which are partly filled by granular material under conditions of weightlessness. We identify two different modes of granular dynamics, depending on the amplitude of driving, $A$. For intense forcing, A>A_0, the material is found in the collect-and-collide regime where the center of mass of the granulate moves synchronously with the driven container while for weak forcing, A<A_0, the granular material exhibits gas-like behavior. Both regimes correspond to different dissipation mechanisms, leading to different scaling with amplitude and frequency of the excitation and with the mass of the granulate. For the collect-and-collide regime, we explain the dependence on frequency and amplitude of the excitation by means of an effective one-particle model. For both regimes, the results may be collapsed to a single curve characterizing the physics of granular dampers.
We employ numerical simulations to understand the evolution of elastic standing waves in disordered frictional disk systems, where the dispersion relations of rotational sound modes are analyzed in detail. As in the case of frictional particles on a lattice, the rotational modes exhibit an optical-like dispersion relation in the high frequency regime, representing a shoulder of the vibrational density of states and fast oscillations of the autocorrelations of rotational velocities. A lattice-based model describes the dispersion relations of the rotational modes for small wave numbers. The rotational modes are perfectly explained by the model if tangential elastic forces between the disks in contact are large enough. If the tangential forces are comparable with or smaller than normal forces, the model fails for short wave lengths. However, the dispersion relation of the rotational modes then follows the model prediction for transverse modes, implying that the fast oscillations of disks rotations switch to acoustic sound behavior. We evidence such a transition of the rotational modes by analyzing the eigen vectors of disordered frictional disks and identify upper and lower limits of the frequency-bands. We find that those are not reversed over the whole range of tangential stiffness as a remarkable difference from the rotational sound in frictional particles on a lattice.
We examine the transmissibility of a simulated two-dimensional pack of frictionless disks formed by confining dilute disks in a shrinking, periodic box to the point of mechanical stability. Two opposite boundaries are then removed, thus allowing a set of free motions. Small free displacements on one boundary then induce proportional displacements on the opposite boundary. Transmissibility is the ability to distinguish different perturbations by their distant responses. We assess transmissibility by successively identifying free orthonormal modes of motion that have the {em smallest} distant responses. The last modes to be identified in this pessimistic basis are the most transmissive. The transmitted amplitudes of these most transmissive modes fall off exponentially with mode number. Similar exponential falloff is seen in a simple elastic medium, though the responsible modes differ greatly in structure in the two systems. Thus the marginal packs transmissibility is qualitatively similar to that of a simple elastic medium. We compare our results with recent findings based on the projection of the space of free motion onto interior sites.
We experimentally investigate the fluidization of a granular material subject to mechanical vibrations by monitoring the angular velocity of a vane suspended in the medium and driven by an external motor. On increasing the frequency we observe a re-entrant transition, as a jammed system first enters a fluidized state, where the vane rotates with high constant velocity, and then returns to a frictional state, where the vane velocity is much lower. While the fluidization frequency is material independent, the viscosity recovery frequency shows a clear dependence on the material, that we rationalize by relating this frequency to the balance between dissipative and inertial forces in the system. Molecular dynamics simulations well reproduce the experimental data, confirming the suggested theoretical picture.
Recent experiments with rotational diffusion of a probe in a vibrated granular media revealed a rich scenario, ranging from the dilute gas to the dense liquid with cage effects and an unexpected superdiffusive behavior at large times. Here we setup a simulation that reproduces quantitatively the experimental observations and allows us to investigate the properties of the host granular medium, a task not feasible in the experiment. We discover a persistent collective rotational mode which emerges at high density and low granular temperature: a macroscopic fraction of the medium slowly rotates, randomly switching direction after very long times. Such a rotational mode of the host medium is the origin of probes superdiffusion. Collective motion is accompanied by a kind of dynamical heterogeneity at intermediate times (in the cage stage) followed by a strong reduction of fluctuations at late times, when superdiffusion sets in.