Granular Fluids with Solid Friction and Heating

TL;DR

This study uses large-scale molecular dynamics simulations to analyze heated granular fluids with solid friction, revealing non-Gaussian velocity distributions and diffusive behavior below jamming density.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed simulation approach to study energy dissipation and steady states in heated granular fluids with solid friction.

Findings

Velocity distribution is non-Gaussian in steady state.

Particles exhibit diffusive motion below jamming density.

Kinetic energy decays then stabilizes over time.

Abstract

We perform large-scale molecular dynamics simulations to study heated granular fluids in three dimensions. Granular particles dissipate their kinetic energy due to solid frictional interaction with other particles. The velocity of each particle is perturbed by a uniformly-distributed random noise, which mimics the heating. At the early stage of evolution, the kinetic energy of the system decays with time and reaches a steady state at a later stage. The velocity distribution in the steady state shows a non-Gaussian distribution. This has been characterized by using the Sonine polynomial expansion for a wide range of densities. Particles show diffusive motion for densities below the jamming density $\phi_{\rm J}$