On the broad tails in breaking time distributions of vibrated clogging arches

Angel Garcimartín (1) , Bruno Guerrero (1) , Alexandre Nicolas (2) , Rodrigo Barbosa da Silva (1) , Iker Zuriguel (1)

1 UNAV - Universidad de Navarra [Pamplona]
2 iLM - MMCI - iLM - Modélisation de la matière condensée et des interfaces

Flowing grains can clog an orifice by developing arches, an undesirable event in many cases. Several strategies have been put forward to avoid this. One of them is to vibrate the system in order to undo the clogging. Nevertheless, the time taken to break an arch under a constant vibration has a distribution displaying a heavy tail. This can lead to a situation where the average breaking time is not well defined. Moreover, it has been observed in some experiments that these tails tend to flatten for very long times, exacerbating the problem. Here we will review two conceptual frameworks that have been proposed to understand the phenomenon and discuss their physical implications.

Domaines: Matière Molle [cond-mat.soft]; Systèmes désordonnés et réseaux de neurones [cond-mat.dis-nn]; Vibrations [physics.class-ph]

Angel Garcimartín, Bruno Guerrero, Alexandre Nicolas, Rodrigo Barbosa da Silva, Iker Zuriguel. On the broad tails in breaking time distributions of vibrated clogging arches. EPJ Web of Conferences, 2021, 249, pp.03009. ⟨10.1051/epjconf/202124903009⟩. ⟨hal-03367878⟩