2014/07/31 by Balázs Szabó, Balazs Szabo, Janos Torok +11
Engineering · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Composite material #Geology #Geometry #Grain size #Granular flow and fluidized beds #Granular material #Landslides and related hazards #Materials science #Mineralogy #Optics #Particle Dynamics in Fluid Flows #Physics #Quasistatic process #Shear (geology) #Shear zone #Shearing (physics) #Sphere packing #Thermodynamics #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.90.032205
published as Phys. Rev. E 90, 032205 (2014) · 11 pages, 12 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. E
arxiv created 2014/08/07 · openalex publication_date 2014/09/10 · arxiv updated 2014/09/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The evolution of wide shear zones or shear bands was investigated experimentally and numerically for quasistatic dry granular flows in split bottom shear cells. We compare the behavior of materials consisting of beads, irregular grains, such as sand, and elongated particles. Shearing an initially random sample, the zone width was found to significantly decrease in the first stage of the process. The characteristic shear strain associated with this decrease is about unity and it is systematically increasing with shape anisotropy, i.e., when the grain shape changes from spherical to irregular (e.g., sand) and becomes elongated (pegs). The strongly decreasing tendency of the zone width is followed by a slight increase which is more pronounced for rodlike particles than for grains with smaller shape anisotropy (beads or irregular particles). The evolution of the zone width is connected to shear-induced packing density change and for nonspherical particles it also involves grain reorientation effects. The final zone width is significantly smaller for irregular grains than for spherical beads.