Wet Sand flows better than dry sand

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that wet sand flows more easily than dry sand due to reduced resistance, challenging common assumptions, and introduces a non-equilibrium state equation for granular fluids.

Contribution

It provides experimental evidence that wet sand has lower flow resistance than dry sand and proposes a new non-equilibrium state equation for granular fluids.

Findings

Wet sand exhibits lower resistance to flow than dry sand.

Flow initiates at a shear of about one particle diameter.

A non-equilibrium state equation for granular fluids is proposed.

Abstract

We investigated the yield stress and the apparent viscosity of sand with and without small amounts of liquid. By pushing the sand through a tube with an enforced Poiseuille like profile we minimize the effect of avalanches and shear localization. We find that the system starts to flow when a critical shear of the order of one particle diameter is exceeded. In contrast to common believe, we observe that the resistance against the flow of wet sand is much smaller than that of dry sand. For the dissipative flow we propose a non-equilibrium state equation for granular fluids.