Experimental characterization of vibrated granular rings
Z.~A.~Daya, E. Ben-Naim, R. E. Ecke
We report an experimental study of the statistical properties of
vibrated granular rings. In this system, a linked rod and bead
metallic chain in the form of a ring is collisionally excited by a
vertically oscillating plate. The dynamics are driven primarily by
inelastic bead-plate collisions and are simultaneously constrained by
the rings' physical connectedness. By imaging many instances of the
ring configurations, we measure the ensemble averages and
distributions of several physical characteristics on the scale of
individual beads and composite ring. We study local properties such
as inter-bead seperation and inter-bonds angles, and global properties
such as the radius of gyration and center of mass motion. We
characterize scaling with respect to the size of the chain.
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