Behavior of pressure and viscosity at high densities for two-dimensional hard and soft granular materials

The pressure and the viscosity in two-dimensional sheared granular assemblies are investigated numerically. The behavior of both pressure and viscosity is smoothly changing qualitatively when starting from a mono-disperse hard-disk system without dissipation and moving towards a system of (i) poly-disperse, (ii) soft particles with (iii) considerable dissipation. In the rigid, elastic limit of mono-disperse systems, the viscosity is approximately inverse proportional to the area fraction difference from $ϕ_η \simeq 0.7$, but the pressure is still finite at $ϕ_η$. In moderately soft, dissipative and poly-disperse systems, on the other hand, we confirm the recent theoretical prediction that both scaled pressure (divided by the kinetic temperature $T$) and scaled viscosity (divided by $\sqrt{T}$) diverge at the same density, i.e., the jamming transition point $ϕ_J > ϕ_η$, with the exponents -2 and -3, respectively. Furthermore, we observe that the critical region of the jamming transition becomes invisible as the restitution coefficient approaches unity, i.e. for vanishing dissipation. In order to understand the conflict between these two different predictions on the divergence of the pressure and the viscosity, the transition from soft to hard particles is studied in detail and the dimensionless control parameters are defined as ratios of various time-scales. We introduce a dimensionless number, i.e. the ratio of dissipation rate and shear rate, that can identify the crossover from the scaling of very hard, i.e. rigid disks to the scaling in the soft, jamming regime.

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