Scaling of liquid-drop impact craters in wet granular media.

Combining high-speed photography with laser profilometry, we study the dynamics and the morphology of liquid-drop impact cratering in wet granular media-a ubiquitous phenomenon relevant to many important geological, agricultural, and industrial processes. By systematically investigating important variables such as impact energy, the size of impinging drops, and the degree of liquid saturation in granular beds, we uncover a scaling law for the size of impact craters. We show that this scaling can be explained by considering the balance between the inertia of impinging drops and the strength of impacted surface. Such a theoretical understanding confirms that the unique energy partition originally proposed for liquid-drop impact cratering in dry granular media also applies for impact cratering in wet granular media. Moreover, we demonstrate that compressive stresses, instead of shear stresses, control the process of granular impact cratering. Our study enriches the picture of generic granular impact cratering and sheds light on the familiar phenomena of raindrop impacts in granular media.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics

• Publication date

  2015-10-26

• Fields of study

  Physics, Engineering, Environmental Science, Geology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevE.92.042205arXiv 1510.08101PMID 26565233
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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