Loose granular structures stabilized against gravity by an effective cohesive force are investigated on a microscopic basis using contact dynamics. We study the influence of the granular Bond number on the density profiles and the generation process of packings, generated by ballistic deposition under gravity. The internal compaction occurs discontinuously in small avalanches and we study their size distribution. We also develop a model explaining the final density profiles based on insight about the collapse of a packing under changes of the Bond number.
We report numerical results of effective attractive forces on the packing properties of two-dimensional elongated grains. In deposits of non-cohesive rods in 2D, the topology of the packing is mainly dominated by the formation of ordered structures of aligned rods. Elongated particles tend to align horizontally and the stress is mainly transmitted from top to bottom, revealing an asymmetric distribution of local stress. However, for deposits of cohesive particles, the preferred horizontal orientation disappears. Very elongated particles with strong attractive forces form extremely loose structures, characterized by an orientation distribution, which tends to a uniform behavior when increasing the Bond number. As a result of these changes, the pressure distribution in the deposits changes qualitatively. The isotropic part of the local stress is notably enhanced with respect to the deviatoric part, which is related to the gravity direction. Consequently, the lateral stress transmission is dominated by the enhanced disorder and leads to a faster pressure saturation with depth.
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.
We report on experiments that probe the stability of a two-dimensional jammed granular system formed by imposing a quasistatic simple shear strain $gamma_{rm I}$ on an initially stress free packing. We subject the shear jammed system to quasistatic cyclic shear with strain amplitude $deltagamma$. We observe two distinct outcomes after thousands of shear cycles. For small $gamma_{rm I}$ or large $deltagamma$, the system reaches a stress-free, yielding state exhibiting diffusive strobed particle displacements with a diffusion coefficient proportional to $deltagamma$. For large $gamma_{rm I}$ and small $deltagamma$, the system evolves to a stable state in which both particle positions and contact forces are unchanged after each cycle and the response to small strain reversals is highly elastic. Compared to the original shear jammed state, a stable state reached after many cycles has a smaller stress anisotropy, a much higher shear stiffness, and less tendency to dilate when sheared. Remarkably, we find that stable states show a power-law relation between shear modulus and pressure with an exponent $betaapprox 0.5$, independent of $deltagamma$. Based on our measurements, we construct a phase diagram in the $(gamma_{rm I},deltagamma)$ plane showing where our shear-jammed granular materials either stabilize or yield in the long-time limit.
The rheology of cohesive granular materials, under a constant pressure condition, is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. Depending on the shear rate, pressure, and interparticle cohesiveness, the system exhibits four distinctive phases: uniform shear, oscillation, shear-banding, and clustering. The friction coefficient is found to increase with the inertial number, irrespective of the cohesiveness. The friction coefficient becomes larger for strong cohesion. This trend is explained by the anisotropies of the coordination number and angular distribution of the interparticle forces. In particular, we demonstrate that the second-nearest neighbors play a role in the rheology of cohesive systems.
Neicu and Kudrolli observed experimentally spontaneous formation of the long-range orientational order and large-scale vortices in a system of vibrated macroscopic rods. We propose a phenomenological theory of this phenomenon, based on a coupled system of equations for local rods density and tilt. The density evolution is described by modified Cahn-Hilliard equation, while the tilt is described by the Ginzburg-Landau type equation. Our analysis shows that, in accordance to the Cahn-Hilliard dynamics, the islands of the ordered phase appear spontaneously and grow due to coarsening. The generic vortex solutions of the Ginzburg-Landau equation for the tilt correspond to the vortical motion of the rods around the cores which are located near the centers of the islands.