Granular state, definition

Because the objective of the study is to calculate the proportion of a definite component in a binary or in a ternary mixture from the data, the particulate products to be chosen may first demonstrate a certain permittivity contrast at a dense state . It must be stated that in the case of a particulate material, this does not correspond to the dielectric constant of a massive block of the material for which electric contacts between grains do not exist. For instance, the dense state corresponds to a hypothetical block of material having the same quality of dielectric contact as a granular material for which porosity is occupied by vacuum. 

In a more recent development, it has been shown that the "equally likely" hypothesis of Edwards is not essential for the definition of a temperature-like quantity and the much weaker condition of factorizability of distributions (the density of states factorization discussed in the previous section, e.g.) is sufficient [5-7]. The necessary conditions for being able to define a temperature-like variable and a statistical ensemble based on this variable are (I) the existence of a physical quantity that is conserved by the natural dynamics of the system (in thermal systems energy is conserved but in dissipative granular media, it is not) and (II) the frequency of finding different states with the same value of the conserved quantity is factorizable The latter condition implies that if one... 

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