Lift force on an asymmetrical obstacle immersed in a dilute granular flow

This paper investigates the lift force exerted on an elliptical obstacle immersed in a granular flow through analytical calculations and computer simulations. The results are shown as a function of the obstacle size, orientation with respect to the flow direction (tilt angle), the restitution coefficient and ellipse eccentricity. The theoretical argument, based on the force exerted on the obstacle due to inelastic, frictionless collisions of a very dilute flow, captures the qualitative features of the lift, but fails to reproduce the data quantitatively. The reason behind this disagreement is that the dilute flow assumption on which this argument is built breaks down as a granular shock wave forms in front of the obstacle. More specifically, the shock wave change the grains impact velocity at the obstacle, decreasing the overall net lift obtained from a very dilute flow.Comment: 26 pages, preprint format, 15 figures, accepted for publication in PR

IMDB network revisited: unveiling fractal and modular properties from a typical small-world network

We study a subset of the movie collaboration network, imdb.com, where only adult movies are included. We show that there are many benefits in using such a network, which can serve as a prototype for studying social interactions. We find that the strength of links, i.e., how many times two actors have collaborated with each other, is an important factor that can significantly influence the network topology. We see that when we link all actors in the same movie with each other, the network becomes small-world, lacking a proper modular structure. On the other hand, by imposing a threshold on the minimum number of links two actors should have to be in our studied subset, the network topology becomes naturally fractal. This occurs due to a large number of meaningless links, namely, links connecting actors that did not actually interact. We focus our analysis on the fractal and modular properties of this resulting network, and show that the renormalization group analysis can characterize the self-similar structure of these networks.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in PLOS ON

Experimental and computational studies of jamming

Jamming is a common feature of out of equilibrium systems showing slow relaxation dynamics. Here we review our efforts in understanding jamming in granular materials using experiments and computer simulations. We first obtain an estimation of an effective temperature for a slowly sheared granular material very close to jamming. The measurement of the effective temperature is realized in the laboratory by slowly shearing a closely-packed ensemble of spherical beads confined by an external pressure in a Couette geometry. All the probe particles, independent of their characteristic features, equilibrate at the same temperature, given by the packing density of the system. This suggests that the effective temperature is a state variable for the nearly jammed system. Then we investigate numerically whether the effective temperature can be obtained from a flat average over the jammed configuration at a given energy in the granular packing, as postulated by the thermodynamic approach to grains.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure