Wet granular materials are characterized by a defined bond energy in their particle interaction such that breaking a bond implies an irreversible loss of a fixed amount of energy. Associated with the bond energy is a nonequilibrium transition, settin
g in as the granular temperature falls below the bond energy. The subsequent aggregation of particles into clusters is shown to be a self-similar growth process with a cluster size distribution that obeys scaling. In the early phase of aggregation the clusters are fractals with D_f=2, for later times we observe gelation. We use simple scaling arguments to derive the temperature decay in the early and late stages of cooling and verify our results with event-driven simulations.
We analyze the wide angle x-ray scattering from oriented spider silk fibers in terms of a quantitative scattering model, including both structural and statistical parameters of the $beta$-sheet crystallites of spider silk in the amorphous matrix. The
model is based on kinematic scattering theory and allows for rather general correlations of the positional and orientational degrees of freedom, including the crystallites size, composition and dimension of the unit cell. The model is evaluated numerically and compared to experimental scattering intensities allowing us to extract the geometric and statistical parameters. We show explicitly that for the experimentally found mosaicity (width of the orientational distribution) inter-crystallite effects are negligible and the data can be analyzed in terms of single crystallite scattering, as is usually assumed in the literature.
