Digital image analysis of microstructure of granular soils based on numerical method

Abstract

To avoid the tremendous complication and difficulty of the digital image analysis method in the laboratory which is an important approach to study the microstructure of granular materials that plays significant role and govern the macroscale of granular soils, a new method to perform the digital image analysis of microstructure of the granular soils based on numerical simulation is proposed. A series of numerical models are developed to simulate the plane strain tests of granular soil. Based on the numerical results, two methods are proposed to simulate digital image method in the laboratory: the RENCI 3D slicer method which is a direct analogous to the laboratory method, and the geometric algorithm method which takes advantage of the numerical method and is considered to be more accurate and be able to get more information of the microstructure. Some analyses of the local void ratio distribution and the particle orientation distribution are performed as on physical laboratory experiment. The proposed numerical digital image analysis method is proved to be a valid and more efficient approach for stereological analysis of microstructure of granular soils.