Phase transition in peristaltic transport of frictionless granular particles

Flows of dissipative particles driven by the peristaltic motion of a tube are numerically studied. A transition from a slow “unjammed” flow to a fast “jammed” flow is found through the observation of the flow rate at a critical width of the bottleneck of a peristaltic tube. It is also found that the average and fluctuation of the transition time, and the peak value of the second moment of the flow rate exhibit power-law divergence near the critical point and that these variables satisfy scaling relationships near the critical point. The dependence of the critical width and exponents on the peristaltic speed and the density is also discussed.