Flow of dense granular material: towards simple constitutive laws

Abstract

Recent experiments and numerical simulations of dry granular flows suggest that a simple rheological description in terms of a friction coefficient varying both with shear rate and pressure through a dimensionless inertial number may be sufficient to capture the major properties of granular flows. In this paper we first present the empirical constitutive laws and their interpretation using dimensional analysis, before analysing the prediction for different flow configurations. The successes and limits of the approach are discussed based on comparison with recent studies.