Abstract
Viscoelastic granular materials are present in several disciplines. One example is asphalt mixture employed in road construction. In the last three decades, discrete element modeling has been positioned as a valid tool for the analysis of this multiphase material at the grain-scale. All this despite the simplification of the shape of the particles used in these studies. In this work, it is proposed a simplified procedure for the generation of viscoelastic granular samples composed of irregular polyhedra. The numerical aggregates were generated by a Poisson-Voronoi tessellation based on the particle size distribution (PSD) and statistic data of aggregates, without using complex imaging technics. This procedure set the porosity of the packing, while controlling the PSD. Using this procedure implies a significant computational-time reduction by skipping several preparation stages for polyhedral samples, such as deposition by gravity and compaction. This approach can be used for the study granular materials as inclusion in a solid matrix as concrete or asphalt mixtures, particle breaking, and fatigue damage of viscoelastic materials.
Highlights
Granular materials are present in different disciplines such as agriculture, the pharmaceutical industry and civil en- 2 Numerical protocol gineering, among many others
Terials such as asphalt mixtures, a common practice is to solid grains are surrounded by a viscoelastic matrix com- perform a complex modulus test in a two point bending posed of mastic of bitumen and filler
To validate the proposed nuhavior of this multiphase material is highly dependent on merical procedure, in this study we propose to confront the properties of its individual components in interaction. the experimental and numerical data of complex modulus
Summary
The numerical samples are composed of rigid irregular polyhedral particles generated by a standard PoissonVoronoi tessellation of the trapezoidal prism for a 2PB test, using the NEPER software [11], which generates randomly polycrystals as tessellations. About 3,800 tessellations are created following the experimental PSD (figure 1) cut at 2 mm, in order to reduce the total quantity of elements in the sample, where the fines are included in the mortar phase. This protocol creates convex polyhedrons, based on simplified shapes of actual aggregates, without using complex imaging technics. A snapshot of the generated numerical sample with this approach is displayed in figure 2b. The density of particles is set to 3556 kg.m−3, to reach the total sample mass of 0.6 kg, concentrating the mass of the aggregates and the mortar phase within the particles. The particle-particle and particle-wall coefficient of friction is set to 0.7, which is a typical value for crushed aggregates
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