On the capillary stress tensor in wet granular materials
By Luc Scholtès, P. Hicher, François Nicot, Bruno Chareyre, Félix Darve. 2009
175 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper presents a micromechanical study of unsaturated granular media in the pendular regime, based on numerical experiments using the discrete element method, compared with a microstructural elastoplastic model. Water effects are taken into account by adding capillary menisci at contacts and their consequences in terms of force and water volume are studied. Simulations of triaxial compression tests are used to investigate both macro and micro‐effects of a partial saturation. The results provided by the two methods appear to be in good agreement, reproducing the major trends of a partially saturated granular assembly, such as the increase in the shear strength and the hardening with suction. Moreover, a capillary stress tensor is exhibited from capillary forces by using homogenization techniques. Both macroscopic and microscopic considerations emphasize an induced anisotropy of the capillary stress tensor in relation with the pore fluid distribution inside the material. Insofar as the tensorial nature of this fluid fabric implies shear effects on the solid phase associated with suction, a comparison has been made with the standard equivalent pore pressure assumption. It is shown that water effects induce microstructural phenomena that cannot be considered at the macro level, particularly when dealing with material history. Thus, the study points out that unsaturated soil stress definitions should include, besides the macroscopic stresses such as the total stress, the microscopic interparticle stresses such as the ones resulting from capillary forces, in order to interpret more precisely the implications of the pore fluid on the mechanical behaviour of granular materials. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Mechanics of Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57b99b83ab6ccce767e4ae71be66ca3e43063980
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Citations in the corpus
- A Continuum Model for Deformable, Second Gradient Porous Media Partially Saturated with Compressible Fluids (2013, unknown): “Forthcoming works should consider the application of the presented theory to the case of wave propagation in partially saturated media (using the methods proposed in [21, 37, 29, 30, 35]) and the more general case of unsaturated assemblies of elastic spherical grains (following micro-mechanical argu”
- Pore‐scale modeling of fluid‐particles interaction and emerging poromechanical effects (2013, background): “Namely, the microscale stress can be considered as a micromechanical analog of Terzaghi’s effective stress (this may be also true to some extent in unsaturated materials, as suggested by [22]).”