Microscopic Evaluation of Strain Distribution in Granular Materials during Shear
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 132, Issue 1
Abstract
The evolution of local strains during shear of particles of a granular material is presented in this paper. A cylindrical specimen composed of 6.5-mm spherical plastic particles was loaded under an axisymmetric triaxial loading condition. Computed tomography (CT) was used to acquire three-dimensional images of the specimen at three shearing stages. The high-resolution CT images were used to identify the 3D coordinates of 400 particles. Nine strain components (normal, shear, and rotation), rotation angles, and local dilatancy angles for particle groups were calculated, and their frequency distribution histograms are presented and discussed. It was found that there is no preferred shear direction, and the standard deviation values for shear strain components ( , , and ) were almost equal for the specific test shearing stage. Shear strains as high as 25.6% were recorded for some particle groups. Furthermore, granular particle groups rotated in the 3D space with almost equal amounts of rotation strains when loaded under axisymmetric triaxial condition. Rotation strain values are very close to the corresponding shear strains. Compared to particle sliding, rotation plays a major role in the shearing resistance of granular materials. The cumulative vertical rotation angles can be as high as 38° and the horizontal rotation angles have values as high as 60°. The statistical distributions of the local dilatancy angle of particle groups were calculated and found to be increasing as shearing continues. The “global” dilatancy angle value is very close to the mean local during the first stage of shearing (i.e, when global )
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Acknowledgments
This research is partially funded by the Louisiana Transportation Research Center (LTRC Project No. 02-07GT) and the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (State Project No. 736-99-1057) through the Transportation Innovation for Research Exploration (TIRE) program. Special thanks are due to Dr. Ron Beshears, Mr. David Myers, and Mr. Buddy Guynes of NASA/Marshall Space Flight center for helping us to perform the CT scans. The authors also acknowledge the support of Mr. David Phillip of HYTEC Sensor and Imaging Group for providing a free license of FlashCT-VIZ software. The assistance of Sacit Akbas, Vida Sharafkhani, and Patrick Furlong, graduate and undergraduate students at Louisiana State University, in digitizing some images is highly appreciated.
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© 2006 ASCE.
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Received: May 27, 2004
Accepted: May 12, 2005
Published online: Jan 1, 2006
Published in print: Jan 2006
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