Entropy productions in granular materials

Granular materials display more abundant dissipation phenomena than ordinary materials. In this paper, a brief energy flow path with irreversible processes is illustrated, where the concept of granular temperature Tg, initially proposed for dilute systems, is extended to dense systems in order to quantify disordered force chain configurations. Additionally, we develop the concept of conjugate granular entropy sg and its production equation. Our analyses find out that the granular entropy significantly undermined the elastic contact between particles, seriously affecting the transport coefficients in granular materials and creating new transport processes.