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Updated: Jul 29, 2026

Characterization of Thermal Transport in One-dimensional Solid Materials
Published on: January 26, 2014
Thermal convection in fluidized granular systems
1Departamento de Fisica, Facultad de Ciencias Fisicas y Matematicas, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
Abstract:
Thermal convection is observed in molecular dynamic simulations of a fluidized granular system of nearly elastic hard disks moving under gravity, inside a square box. Boundaries introduce no shearing or time dependence, but the energy injection comes from a slip (shear-free) thermalizing base. The top wall is perfectly elastic and lateral boundaries are either elastic or periodic. The spontaneous temperature gradient appearing in the system due to the inelastic collisions, combined with gravity, produces a buoyancy force that, when dissipation is large enough, triggers convection.
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