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This work demonstrates a new method to estimate inertial numbers in flowing granular materials, suggesting enhanced insights into their rheology.
The rheology of granular materials is commonly described using the inertial number (I) as a measure of their fluidity. As the ratio between the time of macroscopic deformation and the time of microscopic rearrangement, I depends on the shear strain rate within the medium, which can vary in space. With dry granular media being opaque, experimental measurements of the field of inertial numbers were mainly limited to twodimensional (2D) observations along transparent walls in three-dimensional (3D) systems. This work addresses this gap using dynamic x-ray rheography of continuously flowing granular materials through an open channel conveyor belt setup. The granular medium is driven towards a perpendicular wall and forms a steady heap, for which the velocity field along the belt direction is measured in 3D. When used to estimate the shear strain rate, it is shown that, under the heap, a marked 3D pattern develops in the spatial distribution of I. The experimental findings are cross-validated with discrete element method simulations.
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Escobar et al. (2025) studied this question.
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