Mechanics of a granular skin

Somnath Karmakar, Anit Sane, S. Bhattacharya, and Shankar Ghosh
Phys. Rev. E 95, 042903 – Published 20 April 2017
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Abstract

Magic sand, a hydrophobic toy granular material, is widely used in popular science instructions because of its nonintuitive mechanical properties. A detailed study of the failure of an underwater column of magic sand shows that these properties can be traced to a single phenomenon: the system self-generates a cohesive skin that encapsulates the material inside. The skin, consisting of pinned air-water-grain interfaces, shows multiscale mechanical properties: they range from contact-line dynamics in the intragrain roughness scale, to plastic flow at the grain scale, all the way to sample-scale mechanical responses. With decreasing rigidity of the skin, the failure mode transforms from brittle to ductile (both of which are collective in nature) to a complete disintegration at the single-grain scale.

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  • Received 29 September 2016
  • Revised 13 March 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.95.042903

©2017 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Nonlinear DynamicsPolymers & Soft MatterInterdisciplinary Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Somnath Karmakar, Anit Sane, S. Bhattacharya, and Shankar Ghosh*

  • Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Homi Bhabha Road, Mumbai 400005, India

  • *sghosh@tifr.res.in

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Issue

Vol. 95, Iss. 4 — April 2017

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