CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

We investigate the flow and jamming through small apertures of a column of granular disks via a pseudo-dynamic model. We focus on the effect that the preparation of the granular assembly has on the size of the avalanches obtained. Packings with different initial packing fractions are created by tapping the system at different intensities. Surprisingly, packing fraction is not a good indicator of the ability of the deposit to jam a given orifice. Different mean avalanche sizes are obtained for deposits with the same mean packing fraction that were prepared with very different tap intensities. It has been speculated that the number and size of arches in the bulk of the granular column should be correlated with the ability of the system to jam a small opening. We show that this correlation, if exists, is rather poor. A comparison between bulk arches and jamming arches reveals that the aperture not only imposes a lower cut-off on the horizontal span of the arches, but also prevents the formation of blocking arches that, in principle, are wide enough to induce jamming.

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