Granular hydrodynamics and pattern formation in vertically oscillated granular disk layers

The goal of this study is to demonstrate numerically that certain hydrodynamic systems, derived from inelastic kinetic theory, give fairly good descriptions of rapid granular flows even if they are way beyond their supposed validity limits. A numerical hydrodynamic solver is presented for a vibrated granular bed in two dimensions. It is based on a highly accurate shock capturing state-of-the-art numerical scheme applied to a compressible Navier - Stokes system for granular flow. The hydrodynamic simulation of granular flows is challenging, particularly in systems where dilute and dense regions occur at the same time and interact with each other. As a benchmark experiment, we investigate the formation of Faraday waves in a two-dimensional thin layer exposed to vertical vibration in the presence of gravity. The results of the hydrodynamic simulations are compared with those of event-driven molecular dynamics and the overall quantitative agreement is good at the level of the formation and structure of periodic patterns. The accurate numerical scheme for the hydrodynamic description improves the reproduction of the primary onset of patterns compared to previous literature. To our knowledge, these are the first hydrodynamic results for Faraday waves in two-dimensional granular beds that accurately predict the wavelengths of the two-dimensional standing waves as a function of the perturbation's amplitude. Movies are available with the online version of the paper. © 2008 Cambridge University Press.