One way to reduce the damage caused by avalanches in the mountains is to place obstacles in their path. These obstacles can be artificial barriers or natural forests. Knowing how the avalanche ...

From a mechanical perspective, granular materials are stuck between a rock and a fluid place, with behavior resembling neither a solid nor a liquid. Think of sand through an hourglass: As grains ...

When we take a stroll on the beach, we walk on the sand without any trouble. The sand appears solid and is difficult to compress. When we put the same sand grains in an hourglass, they behave very ...

Granular flow mechanics in underground mining addresses the movement and interaction of fragmented rock as it drains through voids created by caving, drawing or blasting. These flows exhibit complex ...

A conceptual framework that describes the fluidlike flow of dry granular materials also works for particles suspended in a liquid. Figure 1: The response to shear of a suspension of particles depends ...

New findings describe the dynamics of the clog of icebergs -- known as an ice mélange -- in front of Greenland's Jakobshavn Glacier. The fast-moving glacier is considered a bellwether for the effects ...

A hiker’s misstep can trigger an avalanche on a pebbled hillside as the pebbles transition from load-bearing solid to flowing fluid. But how to predict the flows of granular systems in their steady ...

Experiments on soft granular materials have allowed researchers to derive a rheological description for these materials by extending an established framework valid for hard granular materials. One ...

If static, this problem is straightforward to solve using FE software because the nonmoving material can be treated as a solid. But attempting to simulate the unloading of the hopper would complicate ...

Physicists have long known that the flow of sand through an hourglass is entirely different from the flow of liquid. In the case of a liquid, the rate of discharge depends on the pressure at the ...

Tune in for this webinar hosted by COMSOL to learn about the capabilities of a newly introduced Granular Flow Module. The latest version of COMSOL Multiphysics® introduced the Granular Flow Module, ...