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Granular fountains: convection cascade in a compartmentalized granular gas
Devaraj van der Meer1, Ko van der Weele, Peter Reimann
1Department of Science and J. M. Burgers Centre for Fluid Dynamics, University of Twente, P. O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands.
Abstract:
This paper extends the two-compartment granular fountain [D. van der Meer, P. Reimann, K. van der Weele, and D. Lohse, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 184301 (2004)] to an arbitrary number of compartments: the tendency of a granular gas to form clusters is exploited to generate spontaneous convective currents, with particles going down in the well-filled compartments and going up in the diluted ones. We focus upon the bifurcation diagram of the general -compartment system, which is constructed using a dynamical flux model and which proves to agree quantitatively with results from molecular dynamics simulations.
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