Hi there! You know these large nuts called Brazil nuts? Don’t worry, I will not make you think that they grow on asteroids. No they don’t. But when you put nuts in a pot, or in a glass, have you ever noticed that the biggest nuts remain at the top? That seems obvious, since we are used to that. But let us think about it… these are the heaviest nuts, and they don’t sink! WTF!!! And you have the same kind of effect on small bodies, asteroids, planetesimals, comets… I present you today a Japanese study about that, entitled Categorization of Brazil nut effect and its reverse under less-convective conditions for microgravity geology by Toshihiro Chujo, Osamu Mori, Jun’ichiro Kawaguchi, and Hajime Yano. This study has recently been published in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Brazil Nut and Reverse Brazil Nut effects

The idea is easy to figure out. If you have a pot full of different nuts, then the smallest ones will be naturally closer to the bottom, since they are small enough to fill the voids between the largest ones. For the same reason, if you fill a bucket first with stones and then with sand, the sand will naturally reach the bottom, flowing around the stones. Flowing is important here, since the sand pretty much behaves as a fluid. And of course, if you put the sand in the bucket first, and then the stones, the stones will naturally be closer to the top. Well, this is the Brazil Nut Effect.

OK, now let us make the story go one step further… You have an empty bucket, and you put sand inside… a third of it, or a half… this results as a flat structure. You put stones, which then cover the sand, lying on its surface… and you shake. You shake the bucket, many times… what happen? the sand is moving, and makes some room for the stones, or just some of them, which migrate deeper… if you shake enough, then some of them can even reach the bottom. This is the Reverse Brazil Nut Effect.

And the funny thing is that you can find this effect on planetary bodies! Wait, we may have a problem… when the body is large enough, then the material tends to melt, the heaviest one migrating to the core. So, the body has to be small enough for its interior being ruled by the Brazil Nut Effect, or its reversed version. If the body is small enough, then we are in conditions of microgravity. The authors give the examples of the Near-Earth Asteroid (433)Eros, its largest diameter being 34.4 km, the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is ten times smaller in length, and the asteroid (25143)Itokawa, its largest length being 535 meters. All of these bodies are in conditions of microgravity, and were visited by spacecraft, i.e. NEAR Shoemaker for Eros in 2001, Rosetta for Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, and Hayabusa for Itokawa in 2003. And all of these space missions have revealed pebbles and boulders at the surface, which motivated the study of planetary terrains in conditions of microgravity.

I mentioned the necessity to shake the bucket to give a chance to Reverse Brazil Nut Effect. How to shake these small bodies? With impact, of course. You have impactors everywhere in the Solar System, and small bodies do not need impactors to be large to be shaken enough. Moreover, this shaking could come from cometary activity, in case of a comet, which is true for Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The authors studied this process both with numerical simulations, and lab experiments.

Numerical simulations

The numerical simulations were conducted with a DEM code, for Discrete Element Modeling. It consisted to simulate the motion of particle which touch each others, or touch the wall of the container. These particles are spheres, and you have interactions when contact. These interactions are modeled with a mixture of spring (elastic interaction, i.e. without dissipation of energy) and dashpot (or damper, which induces a loss of energy at each contact). These two effects are mixed together in using the so-called Voigt rheology.

In every simulation, the authors had 10,224 small particles (the sand), and a large one, named intruder, which is the stone trying to make its way through the sand.

The simulations differed by

the density of the intruder (light as acryl, moderately dense as glass, or heavy as high-carbon chromium steel),

the frequency of the shaking, modeled as a sinusoidal oscillation over 50 cycles,

the restitution coefficient between the sand of the intruder. If it is null, then you dissipate all the energy when contact between the intruder and the sand, and when it is equal to unity then the interaction is purely elastic, i.e. you have no energy loss.

Allowing those parameters to vary will result in different outcomes of the simulations. This way, the influence of each of those parameters is being studied.

A drawback of some simulations is the computation time, since you need to simulate the behavior of each of the particles simultaneously. This is why the authors also explored another way: lab experiments.

Lab experiments

You just put sand in a container, you put an intruder, you shake, and you observe what is going on. Well, said that way, it seems to be easy. It is actually more complicated than that if you want to make proper job.

The recipient was an acryl cylinder, put on a vibration test machine. This machine was controlled by a device, which guaranteed the accuracy of the sinusoidal shaking, i.e. its amplitude, its frequency, and the total duration of the experiment. The intruder was initially put in the middle of the sand, i.e. half way between the bottom of the recipient and the surface of the sand. If it reached the bottom before 30,000 oscillation cycles, then the conclusion was RBNE, and if it raised from the surface the conclusion was BNE. Otherwise, these two effects were considered to be somehow roughly balanced.

But wait: the goal is to model the surface of small bodies, i.e. in conditions of microgravity. The authors did the experiment on Earth, so…? There are ways to reproduce microgravity conditions, like in a parabolic flight, or on board the International Space Station, but this was not the case here. The authors worked in a lab, submitted to our terrestrial gravity. The difficulty is to draw conclusions for the asteroids from Earth-based lab experiments.

At this point, the theory assists the experimentation. If you write down the equations ensuing from the physics (I don’t do it… feel free to do so if you want), these equations ruling the DEM code for instance, you will be able to manipulate them (yes you will) so as to make them depend on dimensionless parameters. For instance: your size is in meters (or in feet). It has the physical dimension of a length. But if you divide your size with the one of your neighbor, you should get something close to unity, but this will be a dimensionless quantity, as the ratio between your size and your neighbor’s. The size of your neighbor is now your reference (let him know, I am sure he would be delighted), and if your size if larger than 1, it means that you are taller than your neighbor (are you?). In the case of our Brazil Nut experiment, the equations give you a gravity, which you can divide by the local one, i.e. either the gravity of your lab, or the microgravity of an asteroid. The result of your simulation will be expressed with respect to this ratio, which you can then re-express with respect to the microgravity of your asteroid. So, all this is a matter of scale. These scaling laws are ubiquitous in lab experiments, and they permit to work in many other contexts.

Triggering the Reverse Brazil Nut effect

And here are the results:

The outcomes of the experiments match the ones of the numerical simulations.

The authors saw practically no granular convection, i.e. the sand initially at the bottom does not migrate to the top. This is here an analogy with fluid mechanics, in which water at the bottom can raise to the top, especially when it warms (warm water is less dense than cold one).

Densest intruders are the likeliest to migrate to the bottom.

The authors identified 3 distinct behaviors for the particles, depending on a dimensionless acceleration Γ.

These behaviors are:

Slow Brazil Nut Effect, Fast BNE, for which the intruder requires less oscillation cycles to raise, Fluid motion, which may induce RBNE. This is favored by rapid oscillations of the shaking.

The study and its authors

And that’s it for today! Please do not forget to comment. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed, and follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and (NEW) Instagram.