Abstract
Shear of granular systems of disks (in 2D) and spheres (3D) has been studied extensively. However, less is known about systems of non-spherical particles, i.e., ellipses and polygons, etc. Here we studied a quasi 2D granular system composed of ellipses in a novel apparatus, which provided homogeneous simple shear by utilizing the weak friction between ellipses and the deformable base of the apparatus. Shear jamming, which was first reported for a disk system [1], was also observed for our ellipse system. We contrast shear jamming for systems of disks and systems of ellipses. By tracking the positions and orientations of the ellipses, we observed that the ellipses gradually rotated to align along a preferred direction as the shear strain increased. We also applied Voronoi tessellation to the packing of ellipses, showing that the distribution of the local density changed during shear. By contrast, such a change in the distribution was not observed in a disk system [2].
Highlights
Granular systems have shown to be of great interest and benefit to theoretical study and industrial applications
Bi et al have shown that a granular system of frictional disks below the isotropic jamming point can be jammed by applying a certain amount of shear strain quasi-statically, a process called shear jamming [1]
We find that shear jamming still occurs in a granular system of ellipses
Summary
Granular systems have shown to be of great interest and benefit to theoretical study and industrial applications. Systems composed of disks (in 2D) or spheres (in 3D) under shear have been studied extensively in theory and experiments, including simulations [1, 3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. There have been studies on ellipses, with comparisons to disks, i.e., jamming transitions and dynamical properties, both in experiments and simulations [11,12,13,14]. Most of these studies either focus on systems above jamming or considers dynamics. It is necessary to test shear jamming in a system of ellipses and compare the results with disks
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