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Abstract:
A freely falling stream of weakly cohesive granular particles is modeled and analyzed with the help of event driven simulations and continuum hydrodynamics. The former show a breakup of the stream into droplets, whose size is measured as a function of cohesive energy. Extensional flow is an exact solution of the one-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation, corresponding to a strain rate, decaying like t-1 from its initial value, γ˙0. Expanding around this basic state, we show that the flow is stable for short times, γ˙0t≪1, whereas for long times, γ˙0t≫1, perturbations of all wavelengths grow. The growth rate of a given wavelength depends on the instant of time when the fluctuation occurs, so that the observable patterns can vary considerably