Dynamics of a bouncing dimer

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of a dimer bouncing on a vertically oscillated plate. The dimer, composed of two spheres rigidly connected by a light rod, exhibits several modes depending on initial and driving conditions. The first excited mode has a novel horizontal drift in which one end of the dimer stays on the plate during most of the cycle, while the other end bounces in phase with the plate. The speed and direction of the drift depend on the aspect ratio of the dimer. We employ event-driven simulations based on a detailed treatment of frictional interactions between the dimer and the plate in order to elucidate the nature of the transport mechanism in the drift mode.

4 pages, 5 figures, Movies: http://physics.clarku.edu/~akudrolli/dimer

References in corpus (6)

• Vortices in vibrated granular rods
• Anisotropy driven dynamics in vibrated granular rods
• Two-dimensional Packing in Prolate Granular Materials
• Model of coarsening and vortex formation in vibrated granular rods
• Ratchet-Induced Segregation and Transport of Non-Spherical Grains
• Anisotropic dynamics in a shaken granular dimer gas experiment

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• Phases and correlations in active nematic granular systems
• Controlled Locomotion of a Minimal Soft Structure by Stick-Slip Nonlinearity
• Local bifurcation structure of a bouncing ball system with a piecewise polynomial function for table displacement
• Self-assembled granular walkers
• Edge states, pairing, and sorting of motile chiral particles
• Horizontal transport in the bouncing ball system with a sawtooth-shaped table