Sedimentation of granular columns in the viscous and weakly inertial regimes

Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of granular columns of point particles that interact via long-range hydrodynamic interactions and fall under the action of gravity. We investigate the influence of inertia using the Green's function for the Oseen equation. The initial conditions (density and aspect ratio) are systematically varied. Our results suggest that universal self-similar laws may be sufficient to characterize the temporal and structural evolution of the granular columns. A characteristic time above which an instability is triggered (which may enable the formation of clusters) is also retrieved and discussed.

Optical Enantioseparation of Racemic Emulsions of Chiral Microparticles

“…Our simulations are based on a point-particle model, the robustness of which has been previously discussed in the context of the sedimentation of granular columns [43]. First, we randomly initialize the positions of N = 2M particles in a square (2D case) or cubic (3D case) box of characteristic length L 0 given by r (i) 0 , with i = (1, .…”