Disorders in granular matter

Etienne Guyon

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2005, vol. 357, issue 1, 150-158

Abstract: A major issue in material science is the formulation of a macroscopic description of material properties based on local characteristics. We consider here the case of a granular medium, for which we show that the applicable treatments depend not only on the nature of the disorder but also on the specific property under consideration. The ordinary transport properties of a porous medium are adequately described by classical homogenization techniques introduced long ago in the study of electrical composites. Poorly connected porous systems or multi-phase flows, where a wide range of scale effects are present, require descriptions—such as percolation or fractals—which take into account large-scale disorder. We consider extensions of this approach to other properties—e.g., hydrodynamic dispersion. In a different context, the properties of solid, unconsolidated granular media cannot be treated by homogenization techniques because of the sensitivity of the properties to the local disorder at contact zones; an example of the latter is that the very broad distribution of stresses in a compressed granular medium is found to depend very sensitively on the local ordering and leads to a very heterogeneous distribution of local forces along continuous chains of grains.

Keywords: Porous media; Granular matter; Scaling properties (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437105005066
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:357:y:2005:i:1:p:150-158

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2005.05.055

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().