(95e) Impact of Non-Spherical Projectiles on Granular Media

Recently, several studies involving numerical and experimental methods have focused on the study of impact dynamics in both dry and wet granular media. An example of such instances can be an animal’s foot impacting sand during its locomotion. Understanding the physics behind the interaction between granular media and animal feet can be helpful in optimizing locomotion parameters for bio-inspired robots. However, most of the studies involving impact dynamics considered spherical projectiles under different conditions, while characteristic models should involve more complex shapes. Impacting different geometries with conserved density, volume, and velocity on a granular bed may experience contrasting drag forces upon penetration. This is due to the difference in the surface areas coming in contact with the granular media. In this work, non-spherical geometries of following shapes were considered: cylinder, triangular prism, hexagonal prism and cuboid. These geometries were impacted on a loosely packed non-cohesive dry granular bed with the same impact velocities. The effect of surface area in contact with the granular media was analyzed for impact, with the help of penetration depth measurements. We also tested whether the power law for spherical projectiles is applicable for non-spherical projectile impacts.