Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Taberlet, Nicolas
• Morris, Stephen W
• McElwaine, Jim N

Titel

Washboard road: the dynamics of granular ripples formed by rolling wheels

Ist Teil von

• Physical review letters, 2007-08, Vol.99 (6), p.068003-068003, Article 068003

Ort / Verlag

United States

Erscheinungsjahr

2007

Quelle

American Physical Society Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• We report laboratory experiments on rippled granular surfaces formed under rolling wheels. Ripples appear above a critical speed and drift slowly in the driving direction. Ripples coarsen as they saturate and exhibit ripple creation and destruction events. All of these effects are captured qualitatively by 2D soft-particle simulations in which a disk rolls over smaller disks in a periodic box. The simulations show that compaction and segregation are inessential to the ripple phenomenon. We describe a simplified scaling model which gives some insight into the mechanism of the instability.