No Arabic abstract
We study the influence of particle shape anisotropy on the occurrence of avalanches in sheared granular media. We use molecular dynamic simulations to calculate the relative movement of two tectonic plates. % with transform boundaries. Our model considers irregular polygonal particles constituting the material within the shear zone. We find that the magnitude of the avalanches is approximately independent on particle shape and in good agreement with the Gutenberg-Richter law, but the aftershock sequences are strongly influenced by the particle anisotropy yielding variations on the exponent characterizing the empirical Omoris law. Our findings enable one to identify the presence of anisotropic particles at the macro-mechanical level only by observing the avalanche sequences of real faults. In addition, we calculate the probability of occurrence of an avalanche for given values of stiffness or frictional strength and observe also a significant influence of the particle anisotropy.
We study by means of molecular dynamics simulations of periodic shear cells, the influence of particle shape on the global mechanical behavior of dense granular media. Results at macro-mechanical level show that for large shear deformation samples with elongated particles, independent of their initial orientation, reach the same stationary value for both shear force and void ratio. At the micro-mechanical level the stress, the fabric and the inertia tensors of the particles are used to study the evolution of the media. In the case of isotropic particles the direction of the principal axis of the fabric tensor is aligned with the one of the principal stress, while for elongated particles the fabric orientation is strongly dependent on the orientation of the particles. The shear band width is shown to depend on the particle shape due to the tendency of elongated particles to preferential orientations and less rotation.
Universality in materials deformation is of intense interest: universal scaling relations if exist would bridge the gap from microscopic deformation to macroscopic response in a single material-independent fashion. While recent agreement of the force statistics of deformed nanopillars, bulk metallic glasses, and granular materials with mean-field predictions supports the idea of universal scaling relations, here for the first time we demonstrate that the universality extends beyond the statistics, and applies to the slip dynamics as well. By rigorous comparison of two very different systems, bulk metallic glasses and granular materials in terms of both the statistics and dynamics of force fluctuations, we clearly establish a material-independent universal regime of deformation. We experimentally verify the predicted universal scaling function for the time evolution of individual avalanches, and show that both the slip statistics and dynamics are universal, i.e. independent of the scale and details of the material structure and interactions. These results are important for transferring experimental results across scales and material structures in a single theory of deformation.
We investigate avalanches associated with plastic rearrangements and the nature of structural change in the prototypical strong glass, silica, computationally. Although qualitative aspects of yielding in silica are similar to other glasses, we find that the statistics of avalanches exhibits non-trivial behaviour. Investigating the statistics of avalanches and clusters in detail, we propose and verify a new relation between exponents characterizing the size distribution of avalanches and clusters. Across the yielding transition, anomalous structural change and densification, associated with a suppression of tetrahedral order, is observed to accompany strain localisation.
We present results from a series of experiments on a granular medium sheared in a Couette geometry and show that their statistical properties can be computed in a quantitative way from the assumption that the resultant from the set of forces acting in the system performs a Brownian motion. The same assumption has been utilised, with success, to describe other phenomena, such as the Barkhausen effect in ferromagnets, and so the scheme suggests itself as a more general description of a wider class of driven instabilities.
Combining X-ray tomography with simultaneous shear force measurement, we investigate shear-induced granular avalanches using spherical particles with different surface roughness. We find that systems consisting of particles with large surface roughness display quasi-periodic avalanches interrupted by crackling-like small ones. In contrast, systems consisting of particles with small roughness display no detectable avalanches. The stress drop of quasi-periodic avalanche shows a linear relation with the correlation length of particle non-affine displacement, suggesting that roughness enhances inter-particle locking and hence particle-level dynamic correlation length. However, the nonaffine displacement is two orders of magnitude smaller than particle size, indicating that stress is mainly released on the length scale of roughness. The correlation length of non-affine displacements abruptly increases when a quasi-periodic avalanche occurs, suggesting that quasi-periodic avalanches can be interpreted as a spinodal nucleation event in a first-order phase transition.