Photonic glass is a material class that can be used as photonic broadband reflectors, for example in the infrared regime as thermal barrier coating films. Photonic properties such as the reflectivity depend on the ordering and material packing fraction over the complete film thickness of up to 100 µm. Nanotomography allows acquiring these key parameters throughout the sample volume at the requi...

The liquid crystal phase behavior of linear and partially flexible hard-sphere chain fluids and the solubility of hard spheres in hard-sphere chain fluids are studied by constant pressure Monte Carlo simulations. An extensive study on the phase behavior of linear fluids with a length of 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 20 beads is carried out. The phase behavior of partially flexible fluids...

Effect of addition of filler material to the natural fiber composite was experimentally investigated. Composites are manufactured by the conventional hand-layup method. All composites are made with a fixed banana fiber with 15% weight fraction addition of different weight fraction of (0, 3, 5, 7.5%) groundnut shell ash is added to the composite. Tensile, hardness, impact and compressive strengt...

The role of the friction coefficient, m, on the jamming properties of disordered, particle packings is studied using computer simulations. Compressed, soft-sphere packings are brought towards the jamming transition—the point where a packing loses mechanical stability—by decreasing the packing fraction. The values of the packing fraction at the jamming transition, fmc, gradually decrease from th...

For the last 50 years, the flow of a granular material through an aperture has been intensely studied in gravity-driven vertical systems (e.g., silos and hoppers). Nevertheless, in many industrial applications, grains are horizontally transported at constant velocity, lying on conveyor belts or floating on the surface of flowing liquids. Unlike fluid flows, that are controlled by the pressure, ...

In a previous paper analytical equations were derived for the packing fraction of crystalline structures consisting of bimodal randomly placed hard spheres [H. J. H. Brouwers, Phys. Rev. E 76, 041304 (2007)]. The bimodal packing fraction was derived for the three crystalline cubic systems: viz., face-centered cubic, body-centered cubic, and simple cubic. These three equations appeared also to b...

We investigated the effects of particle shape on shear thickening in densely packed suspensions. Rods of different aspect ratios and nonconvex hooked rods were fabricated. Viscosity curves and normal stresses were measured using a rheometer for a wide range of packing fractions for each shape. Suspensions of each shape exhibit qualitatively similar discontinuous shear thickening. The logarithmi...

The regime transitions of granular flow in a model shear cell are investigated numerically with a stress-controlled boundary condition. The correlations between the elastically and kinetically scaled stresses and the packing fraction are examined, and two packing fractions (0.58 and 0.50) are identified for the quasistatic to intermediate and intermediate to inertial regime transitions. The pro...

We conduct numerical simulations of random packings of frictionless particles at T = 0. The packing fraction where the pressure becomes nonzero is the same as the jamming threshold, where the static shear modulus becomes nonzero. The distribution of threshold packing fractions narrows, and its peak approaches random close packing as the system size increases. For packing fractions within the pe...