Why anyone can make a sandcastle

Klintersaas

Anyone trying to build sandcastles on the beach will need some degree of skill and imagination, but not an instruction manual. The water content is actually relatively unimportant to the mechanical properties of the sand. This observation, which is borne out by precise measurements in the laboratory, puzzles researchers. Even with water content of just 3%, the fluid inside represents a highly-complex structure. The mechanical stiffness of the wet sand remains practically constant with moisture ranging from less than 1% to well over 10%, although the fluid structure changes enormously internally. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation in Göttingen, the Australia National University in Canberra, the University of Erlangen, and the ESRF in Grenoble have studied the fluid structures in moist granules using x-ray microtomography to discover their laws.

Lees meer ... Max Planck Society, Physics.org, EurekAlert en ScienceDaily

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Why anyone can make a sandcastle

Why anyone can make a sandcastle