No Arabic abstract
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.
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 the rheology of dry and wet granular materials in the steady quasistatic regime using the Discrete Element Method (DEM) in a split-bottom ring shear cell with focus on the macroscopic friction. The aim of our study is to understand the local rheology of bulk flow at various positions in the shear band, where the system is in critical state. The general(ized) rheology has four dimensionless control parameters that relate the time scales of five significant phenomena, namely, the time scales related to confining pressure $t_p$, shear rate $t_{dot{gamma}}$, particle stiffness $t_k$, gravity $t_g$ and cohesion $t_c$, respectively. We show that those phenomena collectively contribute to the rheology as multiplicative correction functions. While $t_{dot{gamma}}$ is large and thus little important for most of the data studied, it can increase the friction of flow in critical state, where the shear gradients are high. $t_g$ and $t_k$ are comparable to $t_p$ in the bulk, but become more or less dominant relative to $t_p$ at the extremes of the free surface and deep inside the bulk, respectively. We also measure the effect of strong wet cohesion on the flow rheology, as quantified by decreasing $t_c$. Furthermore, the proposed rheological model predicts well the shear thinning behavior both in the bulk and near the free surface; shear thinning develops to shear thickening near the free surface with increasing cohesion.
Based on discrete element method simulations, we propose a new form of the constitution equation for granular flows independent of packing fraction. Rescaling the stress ratio $mu$ by a power of dimensionless temperature $Theta$ makes the data from a wide set of flow geometries collapse to a master curve depending only on the inertial number $I$. The basic power-law structure appears robust to varying particle properties (e.g. surface friction) in both 2D and 3D systems. We show how this rheology fits and extends frameworks such as kinetic theory and the Nonlocal Granular Fluidity model.
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.
Hydrogels hold promise in agriculture as reservoirs of water in dry soil, potentially alleviating the burden of irrigation. However, confinement in soil can markedly reduce the ability of hydrogels to absorb water and swell, limiting their widespread adoption. Unfortunately, the underlying reason remains unknown. By directly visualizing the swelling of hydrogels confined in three-dimensional granular media, we demonstrate that the extent of hydrogel swelling is determined by the competition between the force exerted by the hydrogel due to osmotic swelling and the confining force transmitted by the surrounding grains. Furthermore, the medium can itself be restructured by hydrogel swelling, as set by the balance between the osmotic swelling force, the confining force, and intergrain friction. Together, our results provide quantitative principles to predict how hydrogels behave in confinement, potentially improving their use in agriculture as well as informing other applications such as oil recovery, construction, mechanobiology, and filtration.