Best particle system for Kundt's tube simulation?

Hi all. I'm working on a Kundt's tube simulation and I'm seeking insight as to whether there is a pre-existing particle system out there suited to the job, or whether I should just code this from scratch. I thought I was close using the AS3 BIT-101 Particle class (http://www.christeso.com/blog/index....-class-in-as3/), but now I'm not so sure.

In a nutshell, I have a tube of powder and sound waves. When the sound waves fit neatly into the tube / perfectly overlap, we have resonance and the powder clumps at the bottom of the tube as indicated in the image below. My tube would have a fixed width, not a plunger.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ube_DE.svg.png

There are several ways of doing this, but I'm looking for the most realistic.

• I can align the particles to conform to the shape under the wave based on the y coordinates of the bottom edge of the combined waveform, make the bottom most particles dormant, and make the particles on the edge of the form have random variance so they don't create a hard edge. Also have some stray ones blow around.
  
• I can make it so the particles are pushed into clumps as if the waveforms were electromagnetic fields (I initially tried this using BIT-101's repel clips but didn't quite get what I was looking for, plus I need the particles to stack)
  
• I can make it so the particles are pushed into clumps by the waveform as air currents.

Also, it would be nice to allow the user to initially shake the tube to even out the powder, which rather shoots down the first on the list, unless I have a wave that flattens out as you shake I suppose.

Quite a challenge!

Particles systems are rather new to me, so any insight from you physics guru's would be much appreciated. I'm just not sure which path is the right one!

the thing is, most "particles" you would see there in flash experiments do not collide with each other, and so cannot stack. on the other hand, making them colliding imposes hard limits on total particles number. so either it will be totally fake, or you would have to implement collisions limited to certain area. there were general attemts in this, but none for "particles" afaik.