Granular material asteroids. Some examples of granular materials are snow, nuts, coal, sand, rice, coffee, corn flakes, fertilizer, and bearing balls. Research into granular materials is thus directly applicable and goes back at least to Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, whose law of friction was originally stated for granular materials. Granular materials are commercially important in applications as diverse as pharmaceutical industry, agriculture, and energy production. Powders are a special class of granular material due to their small particle size, which makes them more cohesive and more easily suspended in a gas. The soldier/physicist Brigadier Ralph Alger Bagnold was an early pioneer of the
Silt land in the past 50 years. With Dutch funding, the Bangladeshi government began to help develop older chars in the late 1970s, and the effort has since become a multi-agency operation building roads, culverts, embankments, cyclone shelters, toilets and ponds, as well as distributing land to settlers. By fall 2010, the program will have allotted some to 21,000 families. A main source of silt in urban rivers is disturbance of soil by construction activity. A main source in rural rivers is erosion from plowing of farm fields, clearcutting or slash and burn treatment of forests. The fertile black silt of