Tuesday, September 12, 2023

4:30pm, Scheuer Room

The Physics of Sand: How Granular Materials Creep, Jam, and Shear

Examples of granular materials exist in abundance, from rice and cereal to sand and rocks. These particulate systems seem simple; they consist of dry, rigid grains that interact by contact force. However, granular materials present many questions to address, such as how force distributes heterogeneously among grains and how flow behavior can readily change between solid-like and fluid-like. Our experimental lab uses an imaging technique to probe this behavior of granular materials at the scale of a single grain. In this talk, I will describe the use of this technique and our experiments to better understand the fundamental physics of granular materials.