Stick-Slip and the Transition to Steady Sliding in a 2D Granular Medium and a Fixed Particle Lattice

We report an experimental study of the stick-slip to steady sliding behavior of a solid object pulled, via a spring, across 2D granular substrates of photoelastic disks that are either fixed in a solid lattice (granular solid) or unconstrained, forming a granular bed. We observe a progression of friction regimes with increasing sliding speed, including single-slip, double-slip, and mixed stick-slip regimes, steady sliding, and inertial oscillations. For the case of the granular bed, we report a detailed analysis of frictional behavior for the low speed stick-slip regime, including spring and elastic energy dependencies during the stick and slip portions of the motion. For the case of the granular solid, we explore friction in the presence and absence of externally applied vibrations, and compare it with sliding on a granular bed, which is intrinsically disordered. We observe that external vibration reduces transition values for both the single-slip to double-slip transition and the stick-slip to steady sliding transition. Moreover, we observe that the effect of packing disorder on granular friction seems similar to the effect of vibration-induced disorder, a result that, to our knowledge, has not been reported previously in the experimental literature.