Granular media to understand physics in the sandbox

Researchers at the École Polytechnique Center for Applied Mathematics are studying the modeling of granular environments that could be of interest to industry and medicine. They are working on modeling two complex physical phenomena that occur when grains are close together, and which are essential to understanding their research: contact between solids, and interaction with fluid. In order to do this, they have developed software to simulate dry granular media up to a million grains, which has provided new results on the behavior of granular media.