Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2105.03845

Measurement of surface deformation and cohesion of a granular pile under the effect of centrifugal force

Abstract

An experimental apparatus measuring free-surface deformation of a centrifuged granular pile is developed. By horizontally rotating a quasi two-dimensional granular pile whose apex is located at the vertical rotation axis, the resultant force of gravity and centrifuge yields the deformation of the granular pile. In this setup, centrifugal force depends on distance from the rotation axis whilst gravitational force is constant everywhere. Therefore, free-surface deformation by various centrifuge degrees can be systematically examined using this apparatus. In the system, a small unit consisting of a camera and computer is rotated with the granular sample to record the rotation-induced deformation. To evaluate the validity of the system, deformation of a rotated water surface is first measured and analyzed. The obtained data are properly explained by the theoretical parabolas without any fitting parameter. Next, we measure the deformation of non-cohesive and cohesive granular piles using the developed apparatus. Both granular samples show the significant deformation of granular pile and finally develop steep granular slopes on the side walls. However, details of the deformation processes depend on the cohesion strength. To quantitatively characterize the difference, the effective strength by cohesion and granular local-slope variations are analyzed based on the experimental results.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

T. i Irie, R. Yamaguchi, S. Watanabe, H. Katsuragi. 2021-05-09. Measurement of surface deformation and cohesion of a granular pile under the effect of centrifugal force. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6501%2Fac1b25

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Scale dependent chirality in twist-bend liquid crystals

The discovery of new classes of lyotropic and thermotropic liquid crystals (e.g., twist-bend, splay, and ferroelectric phases), together with significant advances in experimental techniques for their investigation, has renewed interest in a number of physical phenomena that have been studied in classical liquid crystals (nematics, cholesterics, and smectics) for more than a century. In this paper, we revisit one such ''old--new'' problem, recently highlighted in the preprint by A. Ashkinazi, H. Chhabra, A. El Moumane, M. M. C. Tortora, and J. P. K. Doye, ''Chirality Transfer in Lyotropic Twist-Bend Nematics,'' arXiv:2508.03544v1 (2025), in which various mechanisms of chirality transfer from the molecular scale to the structural scale were discussed. Here we present a simple theoretical analysis of chirality transfer within a Landau theory describing the phase transition between cholesteric and chiral twist-bend liquid crystals. We demonstrate that the handedness of the heliconical structure is opposite to that of the parent cholesteric phase. This relationship originates from the orthogonality between the cholesteric director and the vector order parameter characterizing the phase.

cond-mat.soft

Why life is hot

The process of evolution by natural selection leads to phenotypes of increasing fitness. For cellular chemical reaction networks, this means optimising a variety of fitness functions such as robustness, precision, or sensitivity to external stimuli. We argue that these diverse goals can be achieved by a versatile, generic mechanism: coupling chemical reaction networks to reservoirs that are strongly out of equilibrium. Using theory and numerics we show that this mechanism of optimisation comes at the price of significant heat dissipation. We compute the heat flux caused by kinetic proofreading in {\it Escherichia coli} and show that it constitutes a significant fraction of the total heat flux experimentally measured in this model organism. We then demonstrate that the degree of optimality achievable saturates, and that Nature appears to operate near saturation despite high energetic costs. We argue that `life is hot' largely because of the need for a versatile mechanism to optimise a variety of fitness functions.

cond-mat.soft

Understanding Structural Representation in Foundation Models for Polymers

From the relative scarcity of training data to the lack of standardized benchmarks, the creation of effective foundation models for polymers faces significant and multi-faceted challenges. At the core, many of these issues are tied directly to the structural representation of polymers. Here, we present a chemical language foundation model built on using a SMILES-based polymer graph representation (CPG) that incorporates polymer architectural features and connectivity that are often missing in other line notations. This foundation model exhibited excellent performance on 30 different polymer property benchmark datasets. Critical evaluation of the developed representation against other variations in control experiments reveals this approach to be a robust method of representing polymers in language-based foundation models. These experiments also reveal a strong invariance of structural representations to small perturbations, with many variations of structural representation exceeding or equaling state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Surprisingly, SMILES representations which are chemically or semantically invalid also provided near or SOTA performance in several instances--underscoring an unexamined blind spot in the development of chemistry language models. Examination of error sources and attention maps for the evaluated structural representations corroborate the findings of the control experiments, highlighting the ability of the model to interpolate SMILES sequence space in a manner that is loosely congruent to chemical and architectural space for polymers. Overall, this work highlights the surprising robustness of chemistry language models to structural representation perturbations and identifies the conditions under which CPG representation provides meaningful advantages.

cond-mat.soft