Physics Colloquium
Friday, November 19th, 2004, 4:00 P.M.
E300 Math/Science Center; Refreshments 3:30 P.M. Room E200 Math/Science Center
Joshua Socolar
Department of Physics
Duke University
Force Transmission in Granular Materials
A fundamental property of any material is its response to a localized stress applied at a boundary. For granular materials consisting of hard, cohesionless particles (such as dry sand, coal, pills, or agricultural grains), not even the general form of the stress response function is known. If a marble is placed on top of the sand in a sandbox, for example, nobody knows how the weight of the marble will be distributed over the bottom of the box. The physics is complicated by the existence of highly inhomogeneous, filamentary stress fields on intermediate length scales. Directed force chain networks (DFCNs) provide a theoretical framework for addressing the problem, and analysis of simplified DFCN models reveal both rich mathematical structure and surprising properties.
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~socolar/
|
