The influence of particle characteristics on the behaviour of coarse grained soils

By I. Cavarretta, M. Coop, Catherine O'Sullivan. 2010

454 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper describes an experimental study examining the influence of the mechanical and geometrical properties of the constituent grains on the overall material response of cohesionless granular materials. Glass ballotini were used as an analogue soil; their relatively simple geometry allowed the influence of particle shape and inter-particle friction to be examined independently. Techniques were developed to control the surface roughness of the ballotini to facilitate a parametric study. The particle shape was also varied by crushing the ballotini. At the micro-scale, the particle characterisation included accurate measurements of inter-particle friction, contact stiffness, particle surface roughness and particle shape. At the macro-scale the sensitivity of overall material response to changes in surface roughness and geometry was characterised using triaxial tests and oedometer tests on smooth spherical ballotini, roughened ballotini and crushed angular ballotini. Compression tests indicated that the i...

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d4275a32f99d3687983ec99f8f6f6e1b66d57551

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In Civil and Structural Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

A bonded-particle model for cemented sand (2013, background): “This compensates for more complex shapes of the particles, which are known to have a major effect on the shear resistance [45].”
An investigation of single sand particle fracture using X-ray micro-tomography (2015, background): “Single-particle compression tests have been performed on sand particles with a wide range of particle sizes and mineral types (Lee, 1992; Nakata et al., 1999; McDowell, 2002; Cil & Alshibli, 2012; Cavarretta et al., 2010).”
Dependence of shape on particle size for a crushed rock railway ballast (2013, background): “In practice there may be some differences: Hertzian contact theory assumes that each surface is topographically smooth on both the micro and macro scale, and in reality there is also likely to be some inelastic behavior [15].”
Minimum image quality for reliable optical characterizations of soil particle shapes (2019, unknown): “…shown that angular and elongated soils exhibit larger index void ratios, a larger angle of internal friction, larger dilatancy, a larger constant volume friction angle, larger compressibility, and a larger small-strain modulus than rounded and spherical soils [1,3,5,7,9,14,15,20,23,28,31,41,38,39].”
3D quantitative shape analysis on form, roundness, and compactness with μCT (2016, background): “Roughness, which describes the smallest shape scale, is usually studied in an area of about 20× 20 μm(2)with interferometerwhich could provide a resolution around 1 nm [5,18,41,42].”