Lift forces in granular media

The paper presents an experimental and numerical study of the forces experienced by a cylinder moving horizontally in a granular medium under gravity. Despite the symmetry of the object, a strong lift force is measured. Whereas the drag force increases linearly with depth, the lift force is shown to saturate at depths much greater than the cylinder diameter, and to scale like the buoyancy with a large amplification factor of order 20. The origin of this high lift force is discussed based on the stress distribution measured in discrete numerical simulations. The lift force comes from the gravitational pressure gradient, which breaks the up/down symmetry and strongly modifies the flow around the obstacle compared to the case without pressure gradient.