Experimentally determined dispersion relations for acoustic waves guided along the mechanically free surface of an unconsolidated granular packed structure provide information on the elasticity of granular media at very low pressures that are naturally controlled by the gravitational acceleration and the depth beneath the surface. The experiments confirm recent theoretical predictions that rela...

The current research in granular computing is dominated by set-theoretic models such as rough sets and fuzzy sets. By recasting the existing studies in a wider context, we propose a unified framework of granular computing. The new framework extends results obtained in the set-theoretic setting and extracts high-level common principles from a wide range of scientific disciplines. The art of gran...

We investigate, at a laboratory scale, the collapse of cylindrical shells of radius R and thickness t induced by a granular discharge. We measure the critical filling height for which the structure fails upon discharge. We observe that the silos sustain filling heights significantly above an estimation obtained by coupling standard shell-buckling and granular stress distribution theories. Two e...

We show that the structure of a dense, free-surface boundary layer granular flow is similar to the structure of a laminar liquid flow: There is a strong component of order (stratification parallel to the mean flow) superposed with a mild component of disorder (self-diffusion perpendicular to the mean flow). We also show that the self-diffusion coefficient scales with the mean velocity and propo...

This paper introduces a kind of mechanical structure and its control system, with which granular materials can be put into mould with a higher leveling status, the mechanical structure adopts split type arrangement, its function is to achieve the material removal and scraping, its control system is composed of a plurality of Mitsubishi PLC using masterslave control method. The mechanism and con...

In this paper we propose a formal theory of granular partitions (ways of dividing up or sorting or mapping reality) and we show how the theory can be applied in the geospatial domain. We characterize granular partitions at two levels: as systems of cells, and in terms of their projective relation to reality. We lay down conditions of well-formedness for granular partitions, and we define what i...