How vorticity and agglomeration control shear strength in soft cohesive granular flows

Deformable granular flows present complex kinematics. These materials can have various flow regimes: plastic, agglomerated, rigid-like granular flow, etc. In this paper, a multibody meshfree model is used to investigate the consequences of cohesion, stiffness, and viscosity of the particles on their collective sheared flows in tribological contacts. An approach derived from fluid mechanics postprocessing tools, based on vortex detection, is employed to understand the links between these parameters and the emerging friction coefficient of the sheared interface. These results pave the way to complete kinematic studies of third body simulations in tribological contacts.