ABSTRACT

Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature, including sands and soils, debris flows, avalanches, and earthquakes. Efficient and reliable processing of granular media is also of paramount importance in the oil, pharmaceutical, food, and personal care industries. Non-cohesive granular materials are composed of discrete, rigid grains that interact via frictional contact interactions. Due to dissipative interactions between particles, granular materials remain static with zero net force and torque on each grain in the absence of external driving such as applied shear or vibration. In addition to net force and torque balance on each grain, mechanically stable (MS) static granular packings are linearly stable to small perturbations. A compelling motivation for studying static granular packings is to develop the ability to predict the response of granular systems to applied deformations by quantifying the static structure. Further, static hard-sphere packings have been shown to capture important structural and mechanical properties of dense liquids [29], colloids [30], and other particulate materials.