Variational Approach to Hard Sphere Segregation Under Gravity

Abstract

It is demonstrated that the minimization of the free energy functional for hard spheres and hard disks yields the result that excited granular materials under gravity segregate not only in the widely known "Brazil nut" fashion, i.e. with the larger particles rising to the top, but also in reverse "Brazil nut" fashion. Specifically, the local density approximation is used to investigate the crossover between the two types of segregation occurring in the liquid state, and the results are found to agree qualitatively with previously published results of simulation and of a simple model based on condensation.

10 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Density Functional Theory of Hard Sphere Condensation Under Gravity

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Mechanisms in the size segregation of a binary granular mixture
• Segregation in hard spheres mixtures under gravity. An extension of Edwards approach with two thermodynamical parameters
• Colloidal brazil nut effect in sediments of binary charged suspensions
• Size segregation in granular media induced by phase transition
• Segregation in fluidized versus tapped packs
• Soft repulsive mixtures under gravity: brazil-nut effect, depletion bubbles, boundary layering, nonequilibrium shaking
• Stationary Probability Distribution in Granular Media
• Dynamics and steady state of a vibrated granular binary mixture model
• Segregation and Phase Inversion in a Simple Granular System