Orateur
Description
In the mining industry, piles of extracted materials present a high risk of avalanches, which can cause damage. To avoid these risks, an effective and inexpensive technique is to add a small quantity of flexible fibers that entangle and increase the stability of the granular piles. This fiber-reinforcement technique used in different contexts such as stabilization of sand dunes or coast-line protection against sea erosion.
Although empirical knowledge of fiber stabilization of piles exists, the role of the physical parameters of this problem on avalanche dynamics is largely unknown. To fill this gap, we studied the avalanche dynamics of a model mixture in a rotating drum. In the quasistatic regime, a series of avalanches is observed with a starting angle θ↑ at which the avalanche starts, until it stops down to an angle θ↓. The idea is to
measure those angles for a fiber-reinforced granular medium. We observe effect of fiber volume fraction, fiber length and fiber diameter on the mean values of θ↑, θ↓ and ∆θ = θ↑−θ↓, but also on their distributions.
It appears that with volume fraction of fibers of order 0.3%, there are significant changes in these characteristic properties.
