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 ...

Sand in an hourglass might seem simple and straightforward, but such granular materials are actually tricky to model. From far away, flowing sand resembles a liquid, streaming down the center of an ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the pharmaceutical and food industries, one major roadblock to operational efficiency has been the inability to understand the particulars of granular flow. Recently, however, researchers at MIT ...

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, ...