Abstract
This paper discusses the formation of stable arches in granular materials by using a series of laboratory tests. To this aim, a developed trapdoor apparatus is designed to find dimensions of arches formed over the door in cohesionless aggregates. This setup has two new important applications. In order to investigate the maximum width of the opening generated exactly on the verge of failure, the door can be open to an arbitrary size. In addition, the box containing granular materials (or base angle) is able to be set on optional angles from zero to 90 degrees with respect to the horizontal. Therefore, it is possible to understand the effect of different levels of gravity accelerations on the formed arches. It is observed that for all tested granular materials, increasing the door size and decreasing the base angle, both cause to increase the width and height of the arch. Moreover, the shape of all arches is governed by a parabola. Furthermore, the maximum door width is approximately five to 8.6 times the particle size, depending on the internal friction angle of materials and the base angle.
Highlights
Arching is one of the most common phenomena encountered in granular materials both in the field and laboratory
In other words, arching is closely related to the mobilization of shear strength induced by the relative movement in materials. He used trapdoor tests to explain how stress is transferred from yielding parts of a soil mass to adjacent stationary, nonyielding parts that led to the formation of an arching zone
Several works have been carried out to investigate the arching effect as load transferring in different engineering problems, including earth pressure on retaining structures [2], stability of tunnels [3,4,5,6,7], bearing resistance of piles [8], settlement of pile supported embankments [9], load on buried structures [10], and granular flow in hoppers and silos [11,12,13,14]
Summary
Arching is one of the most common phenomena encountered in granular materials both in the field and laboratory. In other words, arching is closely related to the mobilization of shear strength induced by the relative movement in materials He used trapdoor tests to explain how stress is transferred from yielding parts of a soil mass to adjacent stationary, nonyielding parts that led to the formation of an arching zone. By using this idea, several works have been carried out to investigate the arching effect as load transferring in different engineering problems, including earth pressure on retaining structures [2], stability of tunnels [3,4,5,6,7], bearing resistance of piles [8], settlement of pile supported embankments [9], load on buried structures [10], and granular flow in hoppers and silos [11,12,13,14]. This developed setup can help designers to select a size of hopper or silo outlet with various base angle of materials
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