Dense, inhomogeneous shearing flows of spheres

Abstract

We make use of recent extensions of kinetic theory of granular gases to include the role of particle stiffness in collisions to deal with pressure-imposed shearing flows between bumpy planes in relative motion, in which the solid volume fraction and the intensity of the velocity fluctuations are not uniformly distributed in the domain. As in previous numerical simulations on the flow of disks in an annular shear cell, we obtain an exponential velocity profile in the region where the volume fraction exceeds the critical value at which a rate-independent contribution to the stresses arises. We also show that the thickness of the inertial region, where the solid volume fraction is less than the critical value, and the shear stress at the moving boundary are determined functions of the relative velocity of the boundaries.