Pattern formation in vibrated beds of dry and wet granular materials

The Discrete Element Method was coupled with a capillary liquid bridge force model for computational studies of pattern formation in vibrated granular beds containing dry or wet granular materials. Depending on the vibration conditions applied, hexagonal, stripes, or cellular pattern was observed in the dry vibrated granular bed. In each of these cases, the same hexagonal, stripes, or cellular pattern was also observed in the spatial distribution of the magnitudes of particle-particle collision forces prior to the formation of the corresponding actual pattern in physical distributions of the particles. This seemed to suggest that the pattern formation phenomenon of vibrated granular bed systems might be the result of a two-dimensional Newton's cradle effect. In the presence of a small amount of wetness, these patterns were no longer formed in the vibrated granular beds under the same corresponding set of vibration conditions. Despite the relatively much weaker capillary forces arising from the simulated liquid bridges between particles compared with particle-particle collision forces, the spatial distributions of these collision forces, physical distributions of particles, as well as time profiles of average collision forces were altered significantly in comparison with the corresponding distributions and profiles observed for the dry vibrated granular beds. This seemed to suggest the presence of a two-dimensional Stokes’ cradle effect in these wet vibrated granular bed systems which disrupted the formation of patterns in the wet granular materials that would have been observed in their dry counterparts.