Universality of internal structure characteristics in granular media under shear.

Abstract

We examine the signatures of internal structure emerged from quasistatic shear responses of granular materials based on three-dimensional discrete element simulations. Granular assemblies consisting of spheres or nonspherical particles of different polydispersity are sheared from different initial densities and under different loading conditions (drained or undrained) steadily to reach the critical state (a state featured by constant stress and constant volume). The radial distribution function used to measure the packing structure is found to remain almost unchanged during the shearing process, regardless of the initial states or loading conditions of an assembly. Its specific form, however, varies with polydispersities in both grain size and grain shape. Set Voronoi tessellation is employed to examine the characteristics of local volume and anisotropy, and deformation. The local inverse solid fraction and anisotropy index are found following inverse Weibull and log-normal distributions, respectively, which are unique at the critical states. With further normalization, an invariant distribution for local volume and anisotropy is observed whose function can be determined by the polydispersities in both particle size and grain shape but bears no relevance to initial densities or loading conditions (or paths). An invariant Gaussian distribution is found for the local deformation for spherical packings, but no invariant distribution can be found for nonspherical packings where the distribution of normalized local volumetric strain is dependent on initial states.