Castles made of sand

The perfect recipe for building a sandcastle is eight parts sand to one part water. In the October issue of Nature Physics, Arshad Kudrolli and co-workers show how water stabilizes the sand

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[1] Castles made of sand

DOI: 10.1038/nphys106

The perfect recipe for building a sandcastle is eight parts sand to one
part water. In the October issue of Nature Physics, Arshad Kudrolli and
co-workers show how water stabilizes the sand. Aside from sandcastles, wet
grains capture the physics of a wide variety of problems ranging from wet
milling to debris flow.

The team performed a series of stability measurements using transparent
rotating drums. Using different grain sizes, drum diameters and liquids,
they recorded the angle of the drum before and after an avalanche.
Moreover, the authors propose a liquid-bridge model that does not require
any friction between the grains. Their model includes both surface and
bulk effects of the sandpile - a hybrid approach that settles years of
inconsistent results due largely to different system sizes.
When a sandpile fails, clumps rather than individual grains tend to fall.
Those clumps have a characteristic size - or coherence length, points out
Peter Schiffer in the accompanying News & Views article. Could this be a
connection to the collective behaviour found in traditional hard
condensed-matter physics?

Author contact:
Arshad Kudrolli (Massachuestts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA)
Tel: +1 508 793 7752, E-mail: [email protected]

Additional contact for comment on paper:
Peter Schiffer (Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA)
Tel: +1 814 865 5982, E-mail: [email protected]

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Published: 28 Sep 2005

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