On the rising and sinking of granular bubbles and droplets

Abstract

Recently, the existence of so-called granular bubbles and droplets has been demonstrated experimentally. Granular bubbles and droplets are clusters of particles that respectively rise and sink if submerged in an aerated and vibrated bed of another granular material of different size and/or density. However, currently there is no model that explains the coherent motion of these clusters and predicts the transition between a rising and sinking motion. Here, we propose an analytical model predicting accurately the neutral buoyancy limit of a granular bubble/droplet. This model allows the compilation of a regime map identifying five distinct regimes of granular bubble/droplet motion.

References in corpus (5)

• The Reverse Brazil Nut Problem: Competition between Percolation and Condensation
• Granular Rayleigh-Taylor Instability: Experiments and Simulations
• Segregation in a fluidized binary granular mixture: Competition between buoyancy and geometric forces
• Rayleigh-Taylor Instabilities in Thin Films of Tapped Powder
• The sinking dynamics and splitting of a granular droplet