https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202124903004
Shearing of granular materials in a confined split-bottom Couette cell
1
Department of Physics, Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences, Zanjan 45137-66731, Iran
2
Optics Research Center, Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences, Zanjan 45137-66731, Iran
3
Department of Theoretical Physics & Center for Biophysics, Saarland University, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
* e-mail: mahnoush.madani@iasbs.ac.ir
Published online: 7 June 2021
Formation of shear bands is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the dynamics of granular matter. Several parameters have been so far identified to influence the behavior of the shear bands. We carried out experiments to investigate the evolution of the shear bands in the split-bottom Couette cell in the presence of confining pressure. We employed the Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) to characterize the shear band both in the absence and presence of external pressure. Our results show that the location and width of the shear band are affected by both the confining pressure and the filling height. The shear zone evolves towards the middle of the cylinder and expands to a broader region with increasing applied pressure or filling height; also the angular velocity decreases relative to the rotation rate of the bottom disk. Our findings are consistent with prior empirical observations on the formation of wide shear bands at free surfaces.
A video is available at https://doi.org/10.48448/21w2-6704
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2021
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
