Ken Karmin, kkamrin@mit.edu
Co-authors: David Henann, Georg Koval
Nonlocal continuum modeling of dry granular flow
Despite the ubiquity of granular matter in the world around us, the challenge of predicting the motion of a
collection of flowing grains has proven to be a difficult one, from both computational and theoretical perspectives. In this talk, we begin by presenting a number of the “unusual” behaviors exhibited by dry granular media,
which have posed hurdles from the perspective of developing a continuum model. These behaviors include:
steady-flow fields that do not obey any local flow rheology, flow onset and stoppage phenomena that do not
abide by a standard yield stress, and the motion-induced “quicksand” effect whereby far-away motion changes
the flow resistance everywhere. Herein we present a non-local constitutive relation for granular matter, and
demonstrate that it correctly captures each of these unusual phenomena. This is achieved by corroborating the
model’s predictions against hundreds of existing experimental data sets, which elucidate the aforementioned
behaviors.