Continuous to intermittent flows in growing granular heaps

L. Alonso-Llanes (1, 2) , E. Martínez (2) , A. Batista-Leyva (2, 3) , Renaud Toussaint (4, 1) , E. Altshuler (2)

1 ITES - Institut Terre Environnement Strasbourg
2 Physics Faculty
3 INSTEC - Instituto Superior de Tecnologías y Ciencias Aplicadas
4 PoreLab [Oslo]

If a granular material is poured from above on a horizontal surface between two parallel, vertical plates, a sand heap grows in time. For small piles, the grains flow smoothly downhill, but after a critical pile size Xc, the flow becomes intermittent: sudden avalanches slide downhill from the apex to the base, followed by an “uphill front” that slowly climbs up, until a new downhill avalanche interrupts the process. By means of experiments, controlling the distance between the apex of the sandpile and the container feeding it from above, we show that Xc grows linearly with the input flux, but scales as the square root of the feeding height. We explain these facts from a phenomenological model based on the experimental observation that the flowing granular phase forms a “wedge” on top of the static one, differently from the case of stationary heaps. Moreover, we demonstrate that our controlled experiments allow to predict the value of Xc for the common situation in which the feeding height decreases as the pile increases in size.

Domaines: Matière Molle [cond-mat.soft]; Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]; Géophysique [physics.geo-ph]; Géomorphologie

L. Alonso-Llanes, E. Martínez, A. Batista-Leyva, Renaud Toussaint, E. Altshuler. Continuous to intermittent flows in growing granular heaps. Physical Review E , 2022, 106 (1), pp.014904. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevE.106.014904⟩. ⟨hal-03873876⟩