Convection in horizontally shaken granular material

Abstract

In horizontally shaken granular material different types of pattern formation have been reported. We want to deal with the convection instability which has been observed in experiments and which recently has been investigated numerically. Using two dimensional molecular dynamics we show that the convection pattern depends crucial on the inelastic properties of the material. The concept of restitution coefficient provides arguments for the change of the behaviour with variing inelasticity.