The filling law: a general framework for leaf folding and its consequences on leaf shape diversity.

Leaves are packed in a bud in different ways, being flat, rolled, or folded, but always filling the whole bud volume. This "filling law" has many consequences, in particular on the shapes of growing folded leaves. This is shown here for different types of folding and packing. The folded volume is roughly a part of an ellipsoid, with the veins on the outside rounded face and the lamina margin on the adaxial plane. The veins on the abaxial side protect the fragile lamina inside. The first general consequence of the folds and the space limitation of the lamina growth is the presence of symmetries on the leaf shape, and the second is the quantitative relationships between the sizes of the lobes and sinuses. For particular geometries, the leaf lamina can be limited by lateral veins, creating spoon-like lobes, or tangent cuts, creating asymmetrical wavy perimeters. Changes in the packing between different cultivars correspond to changes in the mature leaf shapes. Each particular case shows how pervasive the geometrical consequences of the filling law are.

Penetration and blown air effect in granular media.

Sand is known to oppose an increasing resistance to penetration with depth. This is different from what happens in liquids since granular media, usually nonthermal systems, oppose solid friction to the motion. We report another striking and "counterintuitive" difference between the penetration dynamics observed in sand and in liquids. When pushing a top-closed shell (e.g., an upside down glass) into a liquid, the trapped air increases the buoyancy and opposes the penetration. It is more difficult to push a top capped cylinder than an opened one vertically into liquids. In contrast, the penetration is considerably easier in dense sand when cylinders are top capped. In this discrete and biphasic medium, the trapped air escapes from the shell, fluidizes the sand, and eases the motion.

Laboratory singing sand avalanches.

Some desert sand dunes have the peculiar ability to emit a loud sound up to 110 dB, with a well-defined frequency: this phenomenon, known since early travelers (Darwin, Marco Polo, etc.), has been called the song of dunes. But only in late 19th century scientific observations were made, showing three important characteristics of singing dunes: first, not all dunes sing, but all the singing dunes are composed of dry and well-sorted sand; second, this sound occurs spontaneously during avalanches on a slip face; third this is not the only way to produce sound with this sand. More recent field observations have shown that during avalanches, the sound frequency does not depend on the dune size or shape, but on the grain diameter only, and scales as the square root of g/d--with g the gravity and d the diameter of the grains--explaining why all the singing dunes in the same vicinity sing at the same frequency. We have been able to reproduce these singing avalanches in laboratory on a hard plate, which made possible to study them more accurately than on the field. Signals of accelerometers at the flowing surface of the avalanche are compared to signals of microphones placed above, and it evidences a very strong vibration of the flowing layer at the same frequency as on the field, responsible for the emission of sound. Moreover, other characteristics of the booming dunes are reproduced and analyzed, such as a threshold under which no sound is produced, or beats in the sound that appears when the flow is too large. Finally, the size of the coherence zones emitting sound has been measured and discussed.

Instantaneous velocity profiles during granular avalanches.

We perform experimental measurements of the instantaneous velocity profile of the flowing layer during granular avalanches. In the pile depth, the velocity profile follows a pure exponential decrease in contrast with steady flows that are known to exhibit a well developed upper linear part. The velocity profile in the pile width is a plug flow with two exponential boundary layers at the walls. Even though no steady state is observed during the avalanche, these velocity profiles are self-similar and build up almost instantaneously, with time independent characteristic lengths.