What do coffee powder, wheat, mustard seeds, granulated sugar, cement, sand, and rocks have in common? They are granular materials, assemblies of solid objects, from tens of micrometers to meter sized, that are generally not bound together by...

A granular material is a conglomeration of discrete solid, macroscopic particles characterized by a loss of energy whenever the particles interact (the most common example would be friction when grains collide). The constituents that compose granular...