Jamming in Granular Polymers

TL;DR

This study investigates the jamming transition in 2D granular polymers, showing how chain length and mixture composition influence jamming density, revealing distinct behaviors from traditional disk systems and indicating multiple jamming types.

Contribution

It demonstrates how chain length and mixture composition affect jamming density and highlights differences from disk systems, suggesting multiple jamming transition types.

Findings

Jamming density decreases with longer chains.

Mixtures of chains and rings further reduce jamming density.

Granular polymer jamming differs from disk system jamming at Point J.

Abstract

We examine the jamming transition in a two-dimensional granular polymer system using compressional simulations. The jamming density \phi_c decreases with increasing length of the granular chain due to the formation of loop structures, in excellent agreement with recent experiments. The jamming density can be further reduced in mixtures of granular chains and granular rings, also as observed in experiment. We show that the nature of the jamming in granular polymer systems has pronounced differences from the jamming behavior observed for polydisperse two-dimensional disk systems at Point J. This result provides further evidence that there is more than one type of jamming transition.