Effect of impact energy on the shape of granular heaps

TL;DR

This study experimentally investigates how impact energy influences the shape of granular heaps in a Hele-Shaw cell, proposing a continuous energy dissipation model that aligns well with observed profiles.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel continuous model incorporating energy dissipation to predict granular heap shapes, validated through experiments.

Findings

Model accurately predicts heap profiles across parameters.

Impact energy significantly affects heap shape.

Good agreement between theoretical and experimental results.

Abstract

We study experimentally the shape of a granular heap formed pouring a granular material into a vertical Hele-Shaw cell and analyze the effect of the grain impact energy. We propose a continuous model for the steady profile of the heap that explicitly considers energy dissipation of flowing grains through inelastic collisions. We solve the model analytically and analyze the resulting height profile as a function of several parameters, such as the restitution coefficient of the grains and their impact energies. We find good agreement between theory and experiments.