Experimental investigation about cyclic oscillations of a binary vibrofluidized granular mixture in N connected compartments

¹  College of Civil Engineering and Mechanics, Lanzhou University - Lanzhou 730000, PRC
²  School of Civil Engineering, Lanzhou Jiaotong University - Lanzhou 730070, PRC

Corresponding author: liuyuan2005@lzu.cn

Received: 14 April 2008
Accepted: 25 August 2008

Abstract

The cyclic oscillation behavior (granular clock) of a vibrofluidized granular gas is experimentally investigated in two kinds of N-compartment systems (cyclic and non-cyclic). For a cyclic system, the gas clusters cyclically into one of the compartments in a random order and the interval of the clustering transition has a tendency to decrease with the evolution of time. But for a non-cyclic system, the order and interval of the clustering are invariable. Specially, in a certain transition range a remarkable intermittent clustering behavior is observed at first in our experiments —the granular gas undergoing a cyclic oscillation shows a sudden uniform state and keeps it for a long time until the new cyclic cluster state emerges.