Granular gases are systems that contain macroscopic particles in low density. Examples include cosmic dust, the rings around the planets Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and also clouds of dust on Earth.

Landslides are one striking example of erosion. When the bonds that hold particles of dirt and rock together are overwhelmed by a force — often in the form of water — sufficient to pull the rock and ...

Granular matter is all around us. Examples include sand, rice, nuts, coffee and even snow. These materials are made of solid particles that are large enough not to experience thermal fluctuations.

The behavior of collections of small particles like sand is known as granular physics, and is an immensely important field for the handling and transport of the wide range of granular materials ...

For example, analytical and numerical investigations have extended classical kinetic theory to systems where granular particles are immersed in a molecular gas, revealing how such interactions ...

What's going on here is a version of the phenomenon known as "jamming" in the study of granular materials. This happens as groups of individual particles become wedged across the mouth of the ...

Bubble formation in granular systems exposed to gas flows, on the other hand, is important for procedures in which a gas is supposed to react as strongly as possible with catalyst particles.

The densest state of granular packings is defined by individual particles that form permanent contacts: The contacts can be monitored quantitatively by stress birefringence in both 2D and 3D. The ...

They realized that scientists knew how to go from the properties of individual particles to the behavior of the granular material made up of those particles, but they didn’t know how to start with a ...

Another type of bonding that can arise between granular particles results from the influence of tiny bridges of water (SN: 1/2/99, p. 6).

In our sand example, that's the small amount of sand in the hourglass behaving as a liquid and the transition to acting like a solid when a large grouping of sand particles is on the beach.