Shear Instabilities in Granular Mixtures

Dynamical instabilities in fluid mechanics are responsible for a variety of important common phenomena, such as waves on the sea surface or Taylor vortices in Couette flow. In granular media dynamical instabilities have just begun to be discovered. Here we show by means of molecular dynamics simulation the existence of a new dynamical instability of a granular mixture under oscillating horizontal shear, which leads to the formation of a striped pattern where the components are segregated. We investigate the properties of such a Kelvin-Helmholtz-like instability and show how it is connected to pattern formation in granular flow and segregation.