Cluster formation by acoustic forces and active fluctuations in levitated granular matter

Brownian forces in sheared granular matter.

We present results from a series of experiments on a granular medium sheared in a Couette geometry and show that their statistical properties can be computed in a quantitative way from the assumption that the resultant from the set of forces acting in the system performs a Brownian motion. The same assumption has been utilized, with success, to describe other phenomena, such as the Barkhausen e...

Dynamics of levitated granular materials

‏‎suppression of coke formation in thermal cracking by coke inhibitors‎‏

‏‎the main purpose of this research was to:1.develop a coking model for thermal cracking of naphtha.2.study coke inhibition methods using different coke inhibitors.developing a coking model in naphtha cracking reactors requires a suitable model of the thermal cracking reactor based on a reliable kinetic model.to obtain reliable results all these models shall be solved simultaneously.for this pu...

Acoustic trapping of active matter.

Confinement of living microorganisms and self-propelled particles by an external trap provides a means of analysing the motion and behaviour of active systems. Developing a tweezer with a trapping radius large compared with the swimmers' size and run length has been an experimental challenge, as standard optical traps are too weak. Here we report the novel use of an acoustic tweezer to confine ...

Droplet and cluster formation in freely falling granular streams.

Particle beams are important tools for probing atomic and molecular interactions. Here we demonstrate that particle beams also offer a unique opportunity to investigate interactions in macroscopic systems, such as granular media. Motivated by recent experiments on streams of grains that exhibit liquid-like breakup into droplets, we use molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the evolution...