Streaming sand grains help define essence of a liquid
(Nanowerk News) Water forms droplets because attractive interactions between molecules produce surface tension. If macroscopic objects—say, grains of sand—replace the molecules, the relative strength of this attraction would dramatically drop. What vestiges of liquid behavior remain in such ultra-low surface tension limit?
Physicists seeking to answer this question have, for the first time, measured the nanoscale forces that cause droplet formation in a falling stream of tiny glass beads. John Royer, a graduate student in physics at the University of Chicago, devised a special apparatus for an $80,000 high-speed camera to image the rapidly changing behavior of the streaming sand, much as a skydiver might photograph a fellow jumper in free fall.
In this high-speed, high-resolution video, freely falling granular streams behave similarly to water flowing from a faucet. These granular streams behave like dense, cold fluids with ultra-low surface tension (cohesion between individual molecules). “These experimental results open up new territory for which there currently is no theoretical framework,” say John Royer and his co-authors.
Royer and his colleagues also measured grain-to-grain interactions directly with an atomic force microscope.
Better understanding of the laws of physics motivates the Chicago experiments. Their results have also drawn the attention of a leading industrial firm, Particulate Solid Research Inc.
