Spatial force correlations in granular shear flow. II. Theoretical implications.

Numerical simulations are used to test the kinetic theory constitutive relations of inertial granular shear flow. These predictions are shown to be accurate in the dilute regime, where only binary collisions are relevant, but underestimate the measured value in the dense regime, where force networks of size xi are present. The discrepancy in the dense regime is due to non-collisional forces that we measure directly in our simulations and arise from elastic deformations of the force networks. We model the non-collisional stress by summing over all paths that elastic waves travel through force networks. This results in an analytical theory that successfully predicts the stress tensor over the entire inertial regime without any adjustable parameters.