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What keeps sandcastles standing?

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Abstract

Any child playing on the beach knows that the physical properties of wet and dry sand are very different. Wet sand can be used to build sharp-featured sandcastles that would be unstable in dry sand. We have now quantified the effect of adding small quantities of liquid to a granular medium. Nanometre-scale layers of liquid on millimetre-scale grains dramatically increase the repose angle (the steepest stable slope that the substance can form) and allow the development of long-range correlations, or clumps.

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Figure 1: The angle of repose (ΘR) as a function of the average liquid-layer thickness on spheres (750 g samples, sphere diameter 0.8 ± 0.2 mm).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, 46556, Indiana, USA

    D. J. Hornbaker, R. Albert, I. Albert, A.-L. Barabási & P. Schiffer

Authors
  1. D. J. Hornbaker
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  2. R. Albert
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  3. I. Albert
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  4. A.-L. Barabási
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  5. P. Schiffer
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Hornbaker, D., Albert, R., Albert, I. et al. What keeps sandcastles standing?. Nature 387, 765 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/42831

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