The aim of this study is to numerically investigate the influence of particle breakage on the mechanical behavior of granular materials using a discrete element method(DEM). To enable particle crushing, non-crushable elementary particles are boned together to represents the granular aggregates which can be crushed when the external force exceeds its strength. The flaw of the aggregate was also modeled by randomly distributed void. Single particle crushing tests were carried out to determine the distribution of particle strength. The results of single particle crushing tests illustrate that the simulated single particle fracture strength and pattern agree well with the Weibull's distribution equation.Conventional oedometer tests, drained monotonic and cyclic triaxial tests were also carried out to investigate the crushing of the aggregates and the associated mechanical behaviors. The effect of confining pressure on the crushing of aggregates and the mechanical behavior was also analyzed. It was found that the peak stress and dilation decrease significantly when particle crushing was considered.The deformation behavior of the specimen is essentially controlled by two factors: particle rearrangement-induced dilation and particle crushing-induced contraction. The increase of permanent strain and the reduction of dilation were observed during cyclic loading and they tend to reach a stable state after a certain number of cycles. The crushing of aggregate is most significant in the first two cycles. The results also indicated that for the same axial strain the volumetric strain and the bound breakage in the cyclic loading tests are significantly larger than that in the monotonic loading tests,especially at high cyclic stress ratio.
The discrete element method was used to investigate the microscopic characteristics of granular materials under simple shear loading conditions. A series of simple tests on photo-elastic materials were used as a benchmark. With respect to the original experimental observations, average micro-variables such as the shear stress, shear strain and the volumetric dilatancy were extracted to illustrate the performance of the DEM simulation. The change of anisotropic density distributions of contact normals and contact forces was demonstrated during the course of simple shear. On the basis of microscopic characteristics, an analytical approach was further used to explore the macroscopic behaviors involving anisotropic shear strength and anisotropic stress-dilatancy. This results show that under simple shear loading, anisotropic shear strength arises primarily due to the difference between principal directions of the stress and the fabric. In addition, non-coaxiality, referring to the difference between principal directions of the strain rate and the stress, generates less stress-dilatancy. In particular, the anisotropic hardening and anisotropic stress-dilatancy will reduce to the isotropic hardening and the classical Taylor’s stress-dilatancy under proportional loading.
Discrete element modeling was used to investigate the effect of particle size distribution on the small strain shear stiffness of granular soils and explore the fundamental mechanism controlling this small strain shear stiffness at the particle level. The results indicate that the mean particle size has a negligible effect on the small strain shear modulus. The observed increase of the shear modulus with increasing particle size is caused by a scale effect. It is suggested that the ratio of sample size to the mean particle size should be larger than 11.5 to avoid this possible scale effect. At the same confining pressure and void ratio, the small strain shear modulus decreases as the coefficient of uniformity of the soil increases. The Poisson＇s ratio decreases with decreasing void ratio and increasing confining pressure instead of being constant as is commonly assumed. Microscopic analyses indicate that the small strain shear stiffness and Poisson＇s ratio depend uniquely on the soil＇s coordination number.
