2011/10/31 by C. Manuel Carlevaro, Luis A. Pugnaloni · 1 citation
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Arch #Classical mechanics #Contact force #Engineering #Granular flow and fluidized beds #Isotropy #Material Dynamics and Properties #Materials science #Mechanics #Optics #Physics #Sports Dynamics and Biomechanics #Stress (linguistics) #Structural engineering #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epje/i2012-12044-7
published as Eur. Phys. J. E 35, 44 (2012) · 7 pages, 7 figures, major revision
arxiv created 2012/05/29 · openalex publication_date 2012/06/01 · arxiv updated 2012/07/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Assemblies of granular particles mechanically stable under their own weight contain arches. These are structural units identified as sets of mutually stable grains. It is generally assumed that these arches shield the weight above them and should bear most of the stress in the system. We test such hypothesis by studying the stress born by in-arch and out-of-arch grains. We show that, indeed, particles in arches withstand larger stresses. In particular, the isotropic stress tends to be larger for in-arch-grains whereas the anisotropic component is marginally distinguishable between the two types of particles. The contact force distributions demonstrate that an exponential tail (compatible with the maximization of entropy under no extra constraints) is followed only by the out-of-arch contacts. In-arch contacts seem to be compatible with a Gaussian distribution consistent with a recently introduced approach that takes into account constraints imposed by the local force balance on grains.