title: Granular fountains: convection cascade in a compartmentalized granular gas.
abstract: This paper extends the two-compartment granular fountain [D. van der Meer, P. Reimann, K. van der Weele, and D. Lohse, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 184301 (2004)] to an arbitrary number of compartments: the tendency of a granular gas to form clusters is exploited to generate spontaneous convective currents, with particles going down in the well-filled compartments and going up in the diluted ones. We focus upon the bifurcation diagram of the general -compartment system, which is constructed using a dynamical flux model and which proves to agree quantitatively with results from molecular dynamics simulations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Science and J. M. Burgers Centre for Fluid Dynamics, University of Twente, P. O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Devaraj
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: van der Meer
authors.forename: Ko
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: van der Weele
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Reimann