Soil which fill the voids among sand grains. Silt is mineralogically like sand but with its higher specific surface area it is more chemically and physically active than sand. But it is the clay content of soil, with its very high specific surface area and generally large number of negative charges, that gives a soil its high retention capacity for water and nutrients. Clay soils also resist wind and water erosion better than silty and sandy soils, as the particles bond tightly to each other, and that with a strong mitigation effect of organic matter. Sand is the most stable of
Granular material the partitions rather than spread evenly into both partitions as would happen in a conventional gas. This effect, known as the granular Maxwell's demon, does not violate any thermodynamics principles since energy is constantly being lost from the system in the process. Granular systems are known to exhibit jamming and undergo a jamming transition which is thought of as a thermodynamic phase transition to a jammed state. The Lubachevsky-Stillinger algorithm of jamming allows one to produce simulated jammed granular configurations. Excited granular matter is a rich pattern-forming system. Some of the pattern-forming behaviours seen in granular materials are: Some of