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Numerical simulation based on the discrete element method (DEM) is used to investigate the flow field generated when a cylindrical obstacle is placed in a supersonic granular stream. Robust validation of the simulation model is performed by comparing numerical results with experiments. Experiments are performed using a two-dimensional set-up generating rapid granular flow owing to gravity. DEM simulations demonstrate that a rapid gas-like stream of grains suddenly decelerates across the shock wave and finally collapses into a slow-moving heap at the cylinder. The volume fraction suddenly increases across the shock layer and remains constant thereafter. The flow physics of the shock wave and the granular heap is elucidated through fundamental fluid dynamic quantities such as the velocity, volume fraction, pressure and granular temperature. It is shown that the interaction of grains with a cylindrical obstacle results in the generation of pressure, which is responsible for sustaining static granular heaps on the cylinder. The total pressure is resolved into collisional and streaming components. A streaming pressure is generated owing to velocity fluctuations, and is found to be significant only in the shock wave region. The observations show that the rheological complexity offered by granular shock waves is a direct manifestation of the dissipative and frictional nature of granular collisions. The new insight into the granular heaps could be relevant to a variety of applications involving granular-fluid–solid interactions.

In this work, we present a study for the estimation of bulk viscosity using the equilibrium molecular dynamics-based Green–Kubo method. We have performed a parametric study to find optimal hyper-parameters to estimate bulk viscosity using the Green–Kubo method. Although similar studies exist for shear viscosity, none has been reported so far specifically for bulk viscosity. The expected uncertainty in bulk viscosity for a given length and number of molecular dynamics trajectories used in statistical averaging is determined. The effect of system size, temperature, and pressure on bulk viscosity has also been studied. The study reveals that the decay of autocorrelation function for bulk viscosity is slower than that for shear viscosity and hence requires a longer correlation length. A novel observation has been made that the autocorrelation length required for convergence in the Green–Kubo method for both shear and bulk viscosity of dilute nitrogen gas is of the same mean collision time length units irrespective of simulation pressure. However, when the temperature is varied, the required autocorrelation length remains unaffected for shear viscosity but increases slightly with temperature for bulk viscosity. The results obtained from the Green–Kubo method are compared with experimental and numerical results from the literature with special emphasis on their comparison with the results from the nonequilibrium molecular dynamics-based continuous expansion/compression method. Although the primary focus and novelty of this work are the discussion on bulk viscosity, a similar discussion on shear viscosity has also been added.