2020/07/09 by Subir K. Das, Das, Subir K., Subhajit Paul +1
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #Granular flow and fluidized beds #Material Dynamics and Properties #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2007.04854
openalex publication_date 2020/07/09 · openalex created_date 2022/07/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Starting from configurations having homogeneous spatial density, we study\nkinetics in a two-dimensional system of inelastically colliding hard particles,\na popular model for cooling granular matter. Following an initial time period,\nthe system exhibits a crossover to an inhomogeneous regime that is\ncharacterized by the formation and growth of particle-rich clusters. We present\nresults on the time dependence of average mass of the clusters and that of\naverage kinetic energy, obtained via event driven molecular dynamics\nsimulations, for a wide range of values for the coefficient of restitution\n(e), by fixing the overall density of particles in the system to a constant\nnumber. The time of onset of crossover from homogeneous to the inhomogeneous\nregime, as is well known, strongly increases as one moves towards the elastic\nlimit. Nevertheless, our presented results suggest that the asymptotic growth\nis independent of e, for uniform definition of cluster, onset of which has a\ndifferent e-dependence than the onset of above mentioned crossover. In other\nwords, not only the exponent but also the amplitude of the power-law growth,\nwhich is widely believed to be the form of the evolution, is at the most very\nweakly sensitive to the choice of e. While it is tempting to attribute this\nfact to the similar feature in the decay of energy, we caution that our current\nunderstanding is not matured enough to draw such a connection between cluster\ngrowth and energy decay in a meaningful manner.\n