20 research outputs found
Spanning the scales of granular materials through microscopic force imaging.
If you walk on sand, it supports your weight. How do the disordered forces between particles in sand organize, to keep you from sinking? This simple question is surprisingly difficult to answer experimentally: measuring forces in three dimensions, between deeply buried grains, is challenging. Here we describe experiments in which we have succeeded in measuring forces inside a granular packing subject to controlled deformations. We connect the measured micro-scale forces to the macro-scale packing force response with an averaging, mean field calculation. This calculation explains how the combination of packing structure and contact deformations produce the observed nontrivial mechanical response of the packing, revealing a surprising microscopic particle deformation enhancement mechanism
Measuring every particle's size from three-dimensional imaging experiments
Often experimentalists study colloidal suspensions that are nominally
monodisperse. In reality these samples have a polydispersity of 4-10%. At the
level of an individual particle, the consequences of this polydispersity are
unknown as it is difficult to measure an individual particle size from
microscopy. We propose a general method to estimate individual particle radii
within a moderately concentrated colloidal suspension observed with confocal
microscopy. We confirm the validity of our method by numerical simulations of
four major systems: random close packing, colloidal gels, nominally
monodisperse dense samples, and nominally binary dense samples. We then apply
our method to experimental data, and demonstrate the utility of this method
with results from four case studies. In the first, we demonstrate that we can
recover the full particle size distribution {\it in situ}. In the second, we
show that accounting for particle size leads to more accurate structural
information in a random close packed sample. In the third, we show that crystal
nucleation occurs in locally monodisperse regions. In the fourth, we show that
particle mobility in a dense sample is correlated to the local volume fraction.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure
Single-dose versus multiple-dose antibiotic prophylaxis for the surgical treatment of closed fractures: A cost-effectiveness analysis
Background and purpose Recent meta-analyses have suggested similar wound infection rates when using single- or multiple-dose antibiotic prophylaxis in the operative management of closed long bone fractures. In order to assist clinicians in choosing the optimal prophylaxis strategy, we performed a cost-effectiveness analysis comparing single- and multiple-dose prophylaxis
Multiple-contact discrete-element model for simulating dense granular media.
This article presents a new force model for performing quantitative simulations of dense granular materials. Interactions between multiple contacts (MC) on the same grain are explicitly taken into account. Our readily applicable MC-DEM method retains all the advantages of discrete-element method simulations and does not require the use of costly finite-element methods. The new model closely reproduces our recent experimental measurements, including contact force distributions in full 3D, at all compression levels of the packing up to the experimental maximum limit of 13%. Comparisons with classic simulations using the nondeformable spheres approach, as well as with alternative models for interactions between multiple contacts, are provided. The success of our model, compared to these alternatives, demonstrates that interactions between multiple contacts on each grain must be included for dense granular packings