Experiments Find Hysteresis and Precursors in the Stick‐Slip Friction of a Granular System
SEP 01, 1997
Do laboratory studies of friction in a variety of systems have similar behavior?
DOI: 10.1063/1.881930
What happens to a granular layer as you increase an applied shear force? In a recent experiment at Haverford College, Satoru Nasuno, Arshad Kudrolli and Jerry Gollub were able to image the particle dynamics directly. Their paper, published in the 4 August issue of Physical Review Letters, describes a stick‐slip behavior at low velocity gradients across the layer, with a transition to continuous motion at higher velocity gradients. Furthermore, within individual slip events, they found that the frictional force is a multivalued function of the velocity.
© 1997. American Institute of Physics
