Yixin Cao

Similarity of wet granular packing to gels

To date, there is still no general consensus on the fundamental principle that governs glass transition. Colloidal suspensions are ordinarily utilized as model systems to study the dynamical arrest mechanisms in glass or gels. Here, we tackle the problem using athermal granular particles. Slow dynamics and structural evolution of granular packing upon tapping are monitored by fast X-ray tomography. When the packing are wet and short-range attractive interactions exist, we find a large amount of locally favoured structures with fivefold symmetry, which bear great structural similarity to colloidal gels. In addition, these structures are almost absent in dry packing with similar packing fractions. The study leads strong support for the geometrical frustration mechanism for dynamic arrest in both thermal and athermal systems with attractive interactions. It also suggests nontrivial structural mechanism, if exists, for dynamic arrest in systems with purely repulsive interactions.

Granular materials flow like complex fluids

Granular materials such as sand, powders and foams are ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial and geotechnical applications. These disordered systems form stable structures when unperturbed, but in the presence of external influences such as tapping or shear they ‘relax’, becoming fluid in nature. It is often assumed that the relaxation dynamics of granular systems is similar to that of thermal glass-forming systems. However, so far it has not been possible to determine experimentally the dynamic properties of three-dimensional granular systems at the particle level. This lack of experimental data, combined with the fact that the motion of granular particles involves friction (whereas the motion of particles in thermal glass-forming systems does not), means that an accurate description of the relaxation dynamics of granular materials is lacking. Here we use X-ray tomography to determine the microscale relaxation dynamics of hard granular ellipsoids subject to an oscillatory shear. We find that the distribution of the displacements of the ellipsoids is well described by a Gumbel law (which is similar to a Gaussian distribution for small displacements but has a heavier tail for larger displacements), with a shape parameter that is independent of the amplitude of the shear strain and of the time. Despite this universality, the mean squared displacement of an individual ellipsoid follows a power law as a function of time, with an exponent that does depend on the strain amplitude and time. We argue that these results are related to microscale relaxation mechanisms that involve friction and memory effects (whereby the motion of an ellipsoid at a given point in time depends on its previous motion). Our observations demonstrate that, at the particle level, the dynamic behaviour of granular systems is qualitatively different from that of thermal glass-forming systems, and is instead more similar to that of complex fluids. We conclude that granular materials can relax even when the driving strain is weak.

X-ray tomography study of the random packing structure of ellipsoids

We present an X-ray tomography study for the random packing of ellipsoids. The local structure displays short-range correlations. In addition to the contact number Z, we introduce ρshell, the average contact radius of curvature for contacting neighbors, as an additional parameter to characterize the local orientational geometry. In general, the local free volume w is affected by both Z and ρshell. We believe that the particle asphericity induces a polydispersity effect to influence the packing properties. A model is introduced which explicitly maps the ellipsoid packing onto a polydispersed sphere one, and it reproduces most of the experimental observations.

A dynamic synchrotron X-ray imaging study of effective temperature in a vibrated granular medium

We present a dynamic synchrotron X-ray imaging study of the effective temperature Teff in a vibrated granular medium. By tracking the directed motion and the fluctuation dynamics of the tracers inside, we obtained Teff of the system using the Einstein relationship. We found that as the system unjams with increasing vibration intensities Γ, the structural relaxation time τ increases substantially which can be fitted by an Arrhenius law using Teff. And the characteristic energy scale of structural relaxation yielded by the Arrhenius fitting is E = 0.20 ± 0.02pd(3), where p is the pressure and d is the background particle diameter, which is consistent with those from hard sphere simulations in which the structural relaxation happens via the opening up of free volume against pressure.

Structural and topological nature of plasticity in sheared granular materials

Upon mechanical loading, granular materials yield and undergo plastic deformation. The nature of plastic deformation is essential for the development of the macroscopic constitutive models and the understanding of shear band formation. However, we still do not fully understand the microscopic nature of plastic deformation in disordered granular materials. Here we used synchrotron X-ray tomography technique to track the structural evolutions of three-dimensional granular materials under shear. We establish that highly distorted coplanar tetrahedra are the structural defects responsible for microscopic plasticity in disordered granular packings. The elementary plastic events occur through flip events which correspond to a neighbor switching process among these coplanar tetrahedra (or equivalently as the rotation motion of 4-ring disclinations). These events are discrete in space and possess specific orientations with the principal stress direction.It is a general consensus that the structural defects are the plasticity carriers in amorphous solids, but its microscopic view remains largely unknown. Cao et a. show that highly distorted coplanar tetrahedra act as defects in granular packings, which flip under shear to carry local plasticity.

Origin of Noncubic Scaling Law in Disordered Granular Packing

Recent diffraction experiments on metallic glasses have unveiled an unexpected noncubic scaling law between density and average interatomic distance, which led to the speculation of the presence of fractal glass order. Using x-ray tomography we identify here a similar noncubic scaling law in disordered granular packing of spherical particles. We find that the scaling law is directly related to the contact neighbors within the first nearest neighbor shell, and, therefore, is closely connected to the phenomenon of jamming. The seemingly universal scaling exponent around 2.5 arises due to the isostatic condition with a contact number around 6, and we argue that the exponent should not be universal.

Fast x-ray micro-tomography imaging study of granular packing under tapping

Owing to the high photon flux of synchrotron radiation, the exposure time is greatly reduced, and the total data-acquisition time of a tomography scan has been shortened to second level. Thus a four dimensional (3D structural and temporal) imaging technique can be utilized to capture the structural evolvement of 3D systems. Utilizing this technique, we studied the structural evolvement and particle-scale dynamics of three dimensional (3D) granular packing under tapping. We conducted a tomographic scan of the packing after each tapping, and the displacement of each particle was captured through a tracking algorithm. An averaged 3D flow field of the packing under tapping was also calculated. The major conclusion of this work is that the local particle fluctuation displacements are correlated with local packing structures, which are characterized through the size and shape of the Voronoi cells.