Scaling properties of granular materials

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the macroscopic properties of granular materials composed of viscoelastic spheres scale when all system lengths are proportionally changed, enabling experimental scaling to lab sizes.

Contribution

It introduces a method to predict how macroscopic properties of granular assemblies change under uniform length scaling.

Findings

Derived scaling laws for granular materials

Method for experimental size reduction

Insights into viscoelastic sphere assemblies

Abstract

Given an assembly of viscoelastic spheres with certain material properties, we raise the question how the macroscopic properties of the assembly will change if all lengths of the system, i.e. radii, container size etc., are scaled by a constant. The result leads to a method to scale down experiments to lab-size.