How cohesion controls the roughness of a granular deposit

Abstract

Cohesive granular materials often form clusters of grains, which alter their flowing properties. How these clusters form and evolve is difficult to visualize in the bulk of the material, and thus to model. Here, we use a proxy to investigate the formation of such clusters, which is the rough surface of a cohesive granular deposit. We characterize this roughness and show how it is related to the cohesion between beads. Specifically, the size of this roughness increases with the inter-particle cohesion, and the profile exhibits a self-affine behaviour, as observed for crack paths in the domain of fractography. In addition to providing a simple method to measure the inter-particle cohesion from macroscopic parameters, these results give better comprehension of the formation of clusters in cohesive granular materials.