Clogging is a phenomenon in which moving particles get stuck, slowing or blocking the flow, but how this transition occurs has remained experimentally unproven. Researchers from Science Tokyo studied superconducting vortices to demonstrate that clogging is a nonequilibrium phase transition. Using a two-step measurement protocol, they distinguished clogging from conventional pinning and revealed that both transitions share a critical point, offering new insights into predicting and controlling clogging across diverse systems.<\/p>\n
Clogging is a common phenomenon where flowing particles encounter bottlenecks that restrict their passage, slowing down or completely halting movement. This phenomenon is observed across a wide range of systems, including granular materials, filtration devices, industrial pipelines and biological transport networks. Understanding how and why clogging occurs is essential for preventing blockages and maintaining efficient transport across natural and engineered systems.<\/p>\n
Despite its widespread incidence, the physical mechanisms governing the transition from continuous flow to complete clogging remain incompletely understood. Previous studies predicted that this transition represents a nonequilibrium phase transition, in which the time required to reach a stable flowing or completely blocked state diverges near a critical point. However, experimental confirmation of this prediction remained lacking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Clogging is a phenomenon in which moving particles get stuck, slowing or blocking the flow, but how this transition occurs has remained experimentally unproven. Researchers from Science Tokyo studied superconducting vortices to demonstrate that clogging is a nonequilibrium phase transition. Using a two-step measurement protocol, they distinguished clogging from conventional pinning and revealed that both [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}