Spanning the scales of granular materials through microscopic force imaging.
Abstract
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.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9502Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1038/ncomms7361Publication Info
Brodu, N; Dijksman, JA; & Behringer, RP (2015). Spanning the scales of granular materials through microscopic force imaging. Nat Commun, 6. pp. 6361. 10.1038/ncomms7361. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9502.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Robert P. Behringer
James B. Duke Professor of Physics
Dr. Behringer's research interests include granular materials: friction, earthquakes,
jamming; nonlinear dynamics; and fluids: Rayleigh-Benard convection, the flow of thin
liquid films, porous media flow, and quantum fluids. His studies focus particularly
on experiments (with some theory/simulation) that yield new insights into the dynamics
and complex behavior of these systems. His experiments involve a number of highly
novel approaches, including the use of photoelasticity for probing granular
This author no longer has a Scholars@Duke profile, so the information shown here reflects
their Duke status at the time this item was deposited.

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