Sands, Powders, and Grains

Granular materials can be found in an enormous variety of places: from the powders used to make vitamin pills to the rings of Saturn, from beaches to grain elevators, and from pottery clay to interstellar dust. This text covers the basic properties of uniform granular materials, the mixing and segregation of heterogeneous materials (the famous "brazil-nut problem"), and numerical models.

Auteur
Andreas Reisinger, geb. 1969, studierte Sozial- und Wirtschaftswissenschaften an der Universität Linz. In seiner Magisterarbeit Unterm Rad beschäftigte er sich mit den Arbeitsbedingungen im internationalen Straßengüterverkehr. Er ist Leiter eines psychosozialen Projekts zur Betreuung von Berufskraftfahrern nach Unfällen und seit 1990 immer wieder selbst als Fernfahrer tätig

Texte du rabat

This book is an introduction to the physical principles underlying the behavior of materials consisting of grains. Such materials can be found in an enormous variety of places, ranging from the powders used to make vitamin pills to the rings of Saturn, from beaches to grain elevators, and from pottery clay to interstellar dust. Granular materials have interested physicists from Coulomb and Faraday to Reynolds and Rayleigh, but only recently have mathematical and experimental methods been developed to analyze their properties in detail. This text develops the fundamental physics of the behavior of granular materials. It covers the basic properties of flow, friction, and fluidization of uniform granular materials; discusses mixing and segregation of heterogeneous materials (the famous "brazil-nut problem"); and concludes with an introduction to numerical models. The presentation begins with simple experiments and uses their results to build concepts and theorems about materials whose behavior is often quite counter-intuitive; it aims to present in a unified way the background needed to understand current work in the field. Developed for students at the University of Paris, the text will be suitable for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students; it should also be of interest to researchers and engineers just eentering the field.

Résumé
This introductory text develops the fundamental physics of the behavior of granular materials. The presentation begins with simple experiments and uses their results to build concepts and theorems about materials whose behavior is often quite counter-intuitive;

Contenu

1. Introduction.- 1.1 Some Orders of Magnitude Defining the Problem.- 1.2 Economic Implications and Industrial Problems.- 1.3 Granular Materials and Geophysics.- 1.4 A Brief Historical Review.- 1.5 Prerequisites and Selected Bibliography.- 2. Interactions in Granular Media.- 2.1 A Single Particle and Its Environment.- 2.2 Interactions between Two Particles.- 2.3 A Single Particle on Top of a Granular Medium.- 2.4 Interactions Between Several Particles.- 3. Fluidization, Decompaction, and Fragmentation.- 3.1 The Static Properties of a Granular Pile.- 3.2 Dynamic Properties of a Granular Pile.- 4. Granular Media in a State of Flow.- 4.1 A Sand Pile in Equilibrium: The Angle of Repose.- 4.2 Avalanche Models.- 5. Mixing and Segregation.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.2 Segregation by Vibration.- 5.3 Segregation by Shearing.- 5.4 Segregation in Oyama's Three-Dimensional Drum.- 6. Numerical Simulations.- 6.1 Introduction.- 6.2 Simulations of Collisions.- 6.3 Molecular Dynamics (MD) Simulations.- 6.4 Simulation of the Dynamics of Contacts.- 6.5 Monte Carlo (MC) Simulations.- 6.6 Sequential Model of a Pile.