Pattern Formation In Granular Materials

This book presents a comprehensive review of experiments and novel theoretical concepts needed to understand the mechanisms of pattern formation in granular materials. An effort is made to connect concepts and ideas developed in granular physics with new emergent fields, especially in biology, such as cytoskeleton dynamics.

This title presents a review of experiments and novel theoretical concepts needed to understand the mechanisms of pattern formation in granular materials. An effort is made to connect concepts and ideas developed in granular physics with new emergent fields, especially in biology, such as cytoskeleton dynamics.

Granular materials are an integral part of our everyday life. They are also the base material for most industrial processing techniques. The highly dissipative nature of the particle collisions means energy input is needed in order to mobilize the grains. This interplay of dissipation and excitation leads to a wide variety of pattern formation processes, which are addressed in this book. The reader is introduced to this wide field by, first, a description of the material properties of granular materials under different experimental conditions that are important in connection with the pattern formation dynamics and, second, by further details given later on in the description of the specific system.

Powders have been studied extensively because they arise in a wide variety of fields, ranging from soil mechanics to manufacture of pharmaceuticals. Only recently, however, with the deepening understanding of fractals, chaos, 1/f noise, and self-organization, has it been useful to study the mechanical properties of powders from a fundamental physical perspective. This book collects articles by some of the foremost researchers in the field, including chapters on: the role of entropy in the specification of a powder, by S.F. Edwards (Cambridge); discrete mechanics, by P.K. Haff (Duke); computer simulations of granular materials, by G.C. Barker (Norwich); pattern formation and complexity in granular flow, by R.P. Behringer and G.W. Baxter (Duke); avalanches in real sand piles, by A. Mehta (Birmingham); micromechanical models of failure, by M.J. Adams (Unilever) and B.J. Briscoe (Imperial College); mixing and segregation in particle flows, by J. Bridgwater (Birmingham); and hard-sphere colloidal suspensions, by P. Bartlett (Bristol) and W. van Megen (Melbourne).

This monograph covers phenomena of deformation and machining of granular media: macroscopic particles of different size, shape, and surface properties which typically exhibit behavior similar to fluids, as well as the behavior of solids under deformation. The book analyses the behavior of granular media in soils, rocks and stones, metals and various synthetic materials, presenting a theoretical description, applications and understanding of basic phenomena in granular matter.

An account of how complex patterns form in sustained nonequilibrium systems; for graduate students in biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, and physics.