Granular packings of hard disks are investigated by means of contact dynamics which is an appropriate technique to explore the allowed force realizations in the space of contact forces. Configurations are generated for given friction coefficients, and then an ensemble of equilibrium forces is found for fixed contacts. We study the force fluctuations within this ensemble. In the limit of zero fr...

Classical "slip and fall" analysis was reformulated in this paper to account for the stochastic nature of friction. As it turned out, the new theory, arising from this analysis, was a precise statement of the distribution function for the smallest value among n independent observations. This made it possible to invoke an important result from the asymptotic theory of extreme order statistics th...

A globally exponentially stable speed observer for mechanical systems was recently reported in the literature, under the assumptions of known (or no) Coulomb friction and no disturbances. In this note we propose and adaptive version of this observer, which is robust vis–à–vis constant disturbances. Moreover, we propose a new globally convergent speed observer that, besides rejecting the disturb...

The granular jamming transition is experimentally investigated in a two-dimensional system of frictional, bidispersed disks subject to quasistatic, uniaxial compression without vibrational disturbances (zero granular temperature). Three primary results are presented in this experimental study. First, using disks with different static friction coefficients (μ), we experimentally verify numerical...

The variation of the monomeric friction coefficient of styrene butadiene copolymer (SBR) and natural rubber (NR) with various degrees of cure was analyzed. Samples with different levels of cure were prepared. Loss tangent measurements of the samples were performed by means of a damped torsion pendulum between 173 K and 373 K. Data were analyzed in the frame of the Kloczkowsky, Mark and Frisch m...

This paper presents an experimental research on the distribution of local friction factor, fb, and global friction factor, f, over the cross-section of a channel with V-shaped bottom, which typically occurs in sewers and culverts. Several series of experiments were conducted for measuring velocity and boundary shear stress. It is found that, Darcy-Weisbach, f, is more sensitive than other resis...

Although Darcy-Weisbach (D-W) equation has been accepted as a standard resistance equation in pressurized flow, some researchers and engineers still prefer to utilize Hazen-Williams (H-W) equation for analyzing water distribution networks (WDNs) in practice. The main difference between roughness coefficients of these two resistance equations is that D-W friction factor varies with Reynolds numb...