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Soft matter

Brittle for breakfast

Nature Physics volume 11, pages 802–803 (2015)Cite this article

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Crushing a brittle porous medium such as a box of cereal causes the grains to break up and rearrange themselves. A lattice spring model based on simple physical assumptions gives rise to behaviours that are complex enough to reproduce diverse compaction patterns.

Cereal is a breakfast staple, but it also harbours some interesting physics. Inside the box, ingredient number one is air: cereal granulates form packings containing voids of various sizes. Compressing the box can make for a denser packing, but the flakes simply break when pressed together, rather than rearranging to fill the voids. Writing in Nature Physics, François Guillard and colleagues1 have rationalized the spectacular compaction behaviours of this class of soft material — providing a complete picture of the dynamics of heterogeneous structures appearing in puffed-rice packs (pictured).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nicolas Vandewalle is in the Department of Physics, University of Liege, 4000 Liege, Belgium,

    Nicolas Vandewalle

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  1. Nicolas Vandewalle
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Correspondence to Nicolas Vandewalle.

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Vandewalle, N. Brittle for breakfast. Nature Phys 11, 802–803 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3455

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