Mikroskopische Grundlagen der mechanischen Eigenschaften feuchter Schüttgüter

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stephan Herminghaus
• Subject Area: Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics
• Term: from 2002 to 2006
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 5365852

What are the conditions for a land-slide to occur? What keeps sand castles standing? How does a granular medium behave at different humidity, and why? These questions, which are of interest by far not only for physicists, reach down to the microscopic mechanisms of wetting of the grains of the material under discussion, in their particular arrangement. There is presently an enormous surge of interest in granular media, not only for reasons of their wide applicational potential, but also due to the scarcity of questions answered to date in this field. The main emphasis, however, is still on dry systems, since humid particulates are still much more complicated than dry ones. However, since the former are of much larger practical relevance than the latter, well defined experiments, and realistic, tractable models are badly needed in order to successfully tackle the problem of understanding the influence of moisture on particulate systems. This is the impetus of the present project.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1052: Benetzung und Strukturbildung an Grenzflächen
• Participating Person: Privatdozent Dr. Michael Schulz