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Register a new userIrreversible Incremental Behavior in a Granular Material
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We test the elasticity of granular aggregates using increments of shear and volume strain in a numerical simulation. We find that the increment in volume strain is almost reversible, but the increment in shear strain is not. The strength of this irreversibility increases as the average number of contacts per particle (the coordination number) decreases. For increments of volume strain, an elastic model that includes both average and fluctuating motions between contacting particles reproduces well the numerical results over the entire range of coordination numbers. For increments of shear strain, the theory and simulations agree quite well for high values of the coordination number.
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We study experimentally the fracture mechanisms of a model cohesive granular medium consisting of glass beads held together by solidified polymer bridges. The elastic response of this material can be controlled by changing the cross-linking of the polymer phase, for example. Here we show that its fracture toughness can be tuned over an order of magnitude by adjusting the stiffness and size of the polymer bridges. We extract a well-defined fracture energy from fracture testing under a range of material preparations. This energy is found to scale linearly with the cross-sectional area of the bridges. Finally, X-ray microcomputed tomography shows that crack propagation is driven by adhesive failure of about one polymer bridge per bead located at the interface, along with microcracks in the vicinity of the failure plane. Our findings provide insight to the fracture mechanisms of this model material, and the mechanical properties of disordered cohesive granular media in general.
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We perform experimental and numerical studies of a granular system under cyclic-compression to investigate reversibility and memory effects. We focus on the quasi-static forcing of dense systems, which is most relevant to a wide range of geophysical, industrial, and astrophysical problems. We find that soft-sphere simulations with proper stiffness and friction quantitatively reproduce both the translational and rotational displacements of the grains. We then utilize these simulations to demonstrate that such systems are capable of storing the history of previous compressions. While both mean translational and rotational displacements encode such memory, the response is fundamentally different for translations compared to rotations. For translational displacements, this memory of prior forcing depends on the coefficient of static inter-particle friction, but rotational memory is not altered by the level of friction.
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