The flow of granular material, like sand, presents many intriguing effects in particular when it is shaken, poured or sheared. Here, the granular medium is modelled by a packing of elastic spheres and simulated via molecular dynamics. Dissipation of energy and shear friction at collisions are...

We perform careful experiments in a turnable cell to determine the angle of repose and various other angles of dry granular materials. We study the dependence of the angle on the presence of walls and find an exponential decay on the distance between the walls. Modification of the granular...

We present a simple one-dimensional model to describe the evolution of a transverse dune field. The model is characterized by the distances between the dunes and their heights, which determine the inter-dune sand flux. The model reproduces the observation that the dunes in a given field have...

In many applications to biophysics and environmental engineering, sedimentation of non-spherical particles for example: ellipsoids, is an important problem. In our work, we simulate the dynamics of oblate ellipsoids under gravity. We study the settling velocity and the average orientation of the...

This is an introductory course into some aspects of the physics of granular materials. Three theoretical questions are looked into more detail corresponding to the 3h of the course: I present some statistical models to describe the shape of a heap under impact and present a way to calculate the...

Extremely dense granular packings are needed for high resistance concrete or hard ceramics. They can only be realised when the size distribution of grains is strongly polydisperse. Typically power law distributions give the best results. We present a simple packing model for polydisperse...

Here we study how a traffic jam spreads on complex networks when driven by an increasing flux between certain initial and final points. For that purpose, we developed two new traffic models based on vehicular traffic and applied them on the Apollonian network and the Swiss road network. The...

We study the morphological changes taking place during large elongations of a superplastic material, described by an ensemble of cells. The deformation and exchange of mass of each cell defines the movement of its corners. This movement is postulated taking into account free grain sliding and...