Mikroskopische Grundlagen der mechanischen Eigenschaften feuchter Schüttgüter

发生滑坡的条件是什么？是什么让沙堡屹立不倒？颗粒介质在不同湿度下的表现如何？为什么？到目前为止，这些问题不仅是物理学家感兴趣的，而且涉及到所讨论的材料颗粒在其特定排列中的润湿的微观机制。目前，人们对颗粒介质的兴趣激增，这不仅是因为它们具有广泛的应用潜力，而且还因为迄今为止在该领域回答的问题很少。然而，主要的重点仍然是干燥系统，因为潮湿的颗粒仍然比干燥的要复杂得多。然而，由于前者比后者具有更大的实际意义，因此，为了成功地解决理解水分对颗粒系统影响的问题，迫切需要定义良好的实验和现实的、可处理的模型。这就是本项目的推动力。

What are the conditions for a land-slide to occur? What keeps sand castles standing? How does a granular medium behave at different humidity, and why? These questions, which are of interest by far not only for physicists, reach down to the microscopic mechanisms of wetting of the grains of the material under discussion, in their particular arrangement. There is presently an enormous surge of interest in granular media, not only for reasons of their wide applicational potential, but also due to the scarcity of questions answered to date in this field. The main emphasis, however, is still on dry systems, since humid particulates are still much more complicated than dry ones. However, since the former are of much larger practical relevance than the latter, well defined experiments, and realistic, tractable models are badly needed in order to successfully tackle the problem of understanding the influence of moisture on particulate systems. This is the impetus of the present project.