Flow-mediated coupling on projectiles falling within a superlight granular medium.

Autor: Solano-Altamirano JM; CINVESTAV-Monterrey, PIIT, Nuevo León 66600, México., Caballero-Robledo GA, Pacheco-Vázquez F, Kamphorst V, Ruiz-Suárez JC
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics [Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys] 2013 Sep; Vol. 88 (3), pp. 032206. Date of Electronic Publication: 2013 Sep 24.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.88.032206
Abstrakt: Interesting collective motion emerges when several heavy intruder disks fall in a loose packed, quasi-two-dimensional granular bed of extremely light grains [F. Pacheco-Vázquez and J. C. Ruiz-Suárez, Nat. Commun. 1, 123 (2010)]. In particular, when two disks impact side by side, they initially repel and then they attract each other until they finally stop. Here we perform experiments and discrete-element soft-particle simulations to determine the range of action and the origin of these attractive and repulsive flow-mediated forces. We find that (1) the drag force on the disks fluctuate with a characteristic length linked to force chains that build up and break; (2) the repulsive force is present when the separation of the intruder disks is less than 6 times the size of the grains of the granular bed, which is the size of an aperture that allows a continuous discharge flow from a container; (3) the attractive force has a range of action between 5 and 6 times the size of the intruder disks; and (4) attraction exists only when intruders move faster than 1 m/s. These results suggest that repulsion originates from jamming of grains between intruders, and it supports the idea that attraction could be due to a "granular pressure" drop in the region between intruders caused by a high flow velocity of grains: a Bernoulli-like effect. However, our results do not rule out other mechanisms of interaction, like fluctuation-induced forces.
Databáze: MEDLINE