Blending liquid into a flowing dry granular material

Abstract

We study experimentally the growth dynamics of a horizontal wet granular aggregate produced by accretion when a dry granular jet impacts a wet substrate. The tomographic imaging demonstrates that the wet aggregate is fully saturated and its cohesion is related to the capillary suction due to the pressure drop at the liquid/air interface. We highlight that the accretion process is characterized by two different growth dynamics depending on the hydrostatic depression in the material. At low depression, the growth dynamics exibits a “diffusive” regime whereas the dynamics becomes linear for higher depressions. A competition between the viscous displacement of the fluid into the granular material and the sticking dynamics is proposed to understand the transition in the growth velocity.