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Published November 2013 | Submitted
Journal Article Open

Crossover from quasi-static to dense flow regime in compressed frictional granular media

Abstract

Being ubiquitous in a large variety of geomaterials, granular assemblies play a crucial role in the mechanical stability of engineering and geophysical structures. For these applications, an accurate knowledge of the processes at the origin of shear localization, i.e. faulting, in frictional granular assemblies submitted to compressive loading is needed. Here we tackle this problem by performing discrete-element numerical simulations. A thorough analysis of the evolution of multi-scale mechanical properties as approaching sample macroscopic instability is performed. Spatial correlations operating within the shear stress and strain fields are analyzed by means of a coarse-graining analysis. The divergence of correlation lengths is reported on both shear stress and strain fields as approaching the transition to sample instability. We thus show that the crossover from a quasi-static regime where the sample deforms infinitely slowly to a dense flow regime, where inertial forces play a significant role, can be interpreted as a critical phase transition. At this transition, no shear band of characteristic thickness can be defined.

Additional Information

© 2013 EPLA. Received 6 May 2013; accepted in final form 15 November 2013; published online 10 December 2013. We thank Gaël Combe for providing the DEM code and for fruitful discussions. We thank Jean Braun for providing routines to compute Voronoi tesselations. All computations were performed at SCCI-CIMENT Grenoble.

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August 19, 2023
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October 25, 2023