Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Local Origins Of Volume Fraction Fluctuations In Dense Granular Materials, James G. Puckett, Frederic Lechenault, Karen E. Daniels

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

Fluctuations of the local volume fraction within granular materials have previously been observed to decrease as the system approaches jamming.We experimentally examine the role of boundary conditions and interparticle friction μ on this relationship for a dense granular material of bidisperse particles driven under either constant volume or constant pressure.Using a radicalVorono¨ı tessellation, we find the variance of the local volume fraction φ monotonically decreases as the system becomes more dense, independent of boundary condition and μ. We examine the universality and origins of this trend using experiments and the recent granocentric model, modified to draw particle locations from an …