Abstract :
[en] When a granular material is driven in microgravity environment, one can assist to the formation of dense and slow regions in the system. Indeed, given the dissipative character of the collisions in the media, energy is lost at each particle interaction and the grains begin to clump locally. The phenomenon has been observed for the first time in the late nineties during sounding rocket experimentation by Falcon and his coworkers and has attracted the interest of many scientists since then. However, precise laws describing the formation and the dynamics of such clusters are still lacking. In order to allow an intensive study of the phenomenon, the European Space Agency set up the SpaceGrains project. Small bronze spheres are enclosed in a rectangular cell and vertically driven by to pistons oscillating in phase opposition. Our work consists in the preparation of the SpaceGrains experiment via molecular dynamics simulations and the elaboration of models predicting the behaviour of the system.
Before we started our study concerning SpaceGrains, we reproduced and extended Falcon’s sounding rocket experiments. We showed that, in addition to the granular gas and the cluster, another dynamical regime can be observed in the system. Indeed, for higher filling fractions, the entire granular media behaves like one single completely dissipative particle called the bouncing aggregate. Bouncing modes are observed and can be explained considering the bouncing ball paradigm. Moreover, we highlighted the role of the packing fraction φ as well as the size of the particles R on the different observed dynamics.
Within the frame of the SpaceGrains device, we studied the impact of all tunable parameters of the experiment on the dynamics of the system. Thanks to an appropriate scaling all transition points that we obtained by varying the driving amplitude A, the packing fraction and the dimen- sions of the cell L fall along a same theoretical curve. The latter is explained regarding the energy transfer from the piston towards the center of the cell.
Once the clustering was controlled, we investigated the handling of the agglomerate. By compartmentalizing the container, local trapping can be achieved and a granular pendant of Maxwell’s demon can be observed in microgravity. Based on the measured particle flux between the compartments, we realized a theoretical model predicting the asymptotic steady state of the system depending on the total number N of particles.
In a clustered system, we investigated the impact of asymmetrical driving on the system’s dy- namics. We showed that the mean position of the cluster can be fully controlled via the amplitude ratio a. Moreover, the natural fluctuations of the agglomerate around its equilibrium position are dictated by the driving frequency f and the mass of the cluster.
Finally, we realized simulations of driven bi-disperse gases and investigated the segregation phenomena in the system. We showed that clustering and segregation are strongly linked and that the size and the mass of the particles impact the segregation dynamics in different ways.
