Internal avalanches in a granular medium

S. S. Manna, D. V. Khakhar
1998 Physical review. E, Statistical physics, plasmas, fluids, and related interdisciplinary topics  
Avalanches of grain displacements can be generated by creating local voids within the interior of a granular material at rest in a bin. Modeling such a two-dimensional granular system by a collection of mono-disperse discs, the system on repeated perturbations, shows all signatures of Self-Organized Criticality. During the propagation of avalanches the competition among grains creates arches and in the critical state a distribution of arches of different sizes is obtained. Using a cellular
more » ... ata model we demonstrate that the existence of arches determines the universal behaviour of the model system.
doi:10.1103/physreve.58.r6935 fatcat:yxdfzogoxjdovfeutue6qjw45m