Simulations of vibrated granular medium with impact velocity dependent restitution coefficient

Abstract

We report numerical simulations of strongly vibrated granular materials designed to mimic recent experiments performed both in presence or absence of gravity. The coefficient of restitution used here depends on the impact velocity by taking into account both the viscoelastic and plastic deformations of particles, occurring at low and high velocities respectively. We show that this model with impact velocity dependent restitution coefficient reproduce results that agree with experiments. We measure the scaling exponents of the granular temperature, collision frequency, impulse, and pressure with the vibrating piston velocity as the particle number increases. As the system changes from a homogeneous gas state at low density to a clustered state at high density, these exponents are all found to decrease continuously with the particle number. All these results differ significantly from classical inelastic hard sphere kinetic theory and previous simulations, both based on a constant restitution coefficient.