Pattern dynamics of cohesive granular particles under a plane shear

TL;DR

This study uses 3D molecular dynamics simulations to explore how cohesive granular particles behave under shear, revealing a critical temperature for temperature collapse and diverse clustering behaviors influenced by initial conditions.

Contribution

The paper introduces a detailed analysis of temperature dynamics and clustering phenomena in cohesive granular particles under shear, highlighting the critical dissipation rate and cluster diversity.

Findings

Granular temperature drops abruptly to zero at a critical temperature.

Characteristic time scales follow a power-law relation with dissipation rate.

Various cluster types depend on initial density and dissipation rate.

Abstract

We perform three dimensional molecular dynamics simulations of cohesive granular particles under a plane shear. From the simulations, we found that the granular temperature of the system abruptly decreases to zero after reaching the critical temperature, where the characteristic time $t_{\rm cl}$ is approximately represented by $t_{\rm cl} \propto (\zeta-\zeta_{\rm cr})^{-\beta}$ with the dissipation rate $\zeta$, the critical dissipation rate $\zeta_{\rm cr}$ and the exponent $\beta \simeq 0.8$. We also found that there exist a variety types of clusters depending on the initial density and the dissipation rate.