The physics of fine powders: plugging and surface instabilities

The behavior of granular matter depends greatly on the size of its elementary components. Besides the well studied field of granulates made up of large sized particles which ignore the interaction of the particles with the fluid or gas environment, the physics of a collection of tiny particles such as fine or superfine powders concerns a majority of industrial applications. This paper briefly outlines several basic behavior of powders showing that new features come into play when the particle interaction with the surrounding gas is taken into account. It starts from two key mechanisms: the first arises when the typical particle velocity is in the order of the free fall velocity of that particle, which simply means that fluid drag comes into play. The second consists in considering the powder cakes as a porous material. Combining these two basic mechanisms with well-known granulate properties such as avalanching or heaping, leads to previously ignored sets of plugging effects or surface instabilities resulting from what we call the ‘volcano effect’. Furthermore, we show that, up to a certain extent, the physics of fine powders interacting with gas, may mimic the physics of wetting liquids. To cite this article: J. Duran, C. R. Physique 3 (2002) 217–227.