Accretion Dynamics on Wet Granular Materials.

Wet granular aggregates are common precursors of construction materials, food, and health care products. The physical mechanisms involved in the mixing of dry grains with a wet substrate are not well understood and difficult to control. Here, we study experimentally the accretion of dry grains on a wet granular substrate by measuring the growth dynamics of the wet aggregate.

Reorganization of a granular medium around a localized transformation.

Physical and chemical transformation processes in reactive granular media involve the reorganization of the structure. In this paper, we study experimentally the rearrangements of a two-dimensional (2D) granular packing undergoing a localized transformation. We track the position and evolution of all the disks that constitute the granular packing when either a large intruder shrinks in size or is pulled out of the granular structure.

Interfacial Instability during Granular Erosion.

The complex interplay between the topography and the erosion and deposition phenomena is a key feature to model granular flows such as landslides. Here, we investigated the instability that develops during the erosion of a wet granular pile by a dry dense granular flow. The morphology and the propagation of the generated steps are analyzed in relation to the specific erosion mechanism.

Erosion dynamics of a wet granular medium.

Liquid may give strong cohesion properties to a granular medium, and confer a solidlike behavior. We study the erosion of a fixed circular aggregate of wet granular matter subjected to a flow of dry grains inside a half-filled rotating drum. During the rotation, the dry grains flow around the fixed obstacle.

Microscale rheology of a soft glassy material close to yielding.

Using confocal microscopy, we study the flow of a model soft glassy material: a concentrated emulsion. We demonstrate the micro-macro link between in situ measured movements of droplets during the flow and the macroscopic rheological response of a concentrated emulsion, in the form of scaling relationships connecting the rheological "fluidity" with local standard deviation of the strain-rate tensor. Furthermore, we measure correlations between these local fluctuations, thereby extracting a correlation length which increases while approaching the yielding transition, in accordance with recent theoretical predictions.

Hydrodynamic modeling of granular flows in a modified Couette cell.

We present simulations of granular flows in a modified Couette cell, using a continuum model recently proposed for dense granular flows. Based on a friction coefficient, which depends on an inertial number, the model captures the positions of the wide shear bands. We show that a smooth transition in velocity-profile shape occurs when the height of the granular material is increased, leading to a differential rotation of the central part close to the surface.

A constitutive law for dense granular flows.

A continuum description of granular flows would be of considerable help in predicting natural geophysical hazards or in designing industrial processes. However, the constitutive equations for dry granular flows, which govern how the material moves under shear, are still a matter of debate. One difficulty is that grains can behave like a solid (in a sand pile), a liquid (when poured from a silo) or a gas (when strongly agitated).