Investigating effect of particle shape on suffusion by CFD-DEM modeling

Abstract

Suffusion is one of the most common causes of hydraulic geological structure failure. During the suffusion process, particle shape is a significant factor to affect the micro-structure and macro-mechanical behaviour of soils. This study applies polyhedron as coarse particles and different aspect ratio values to investigate the effect of particle shape on suffusion by adopting the coupled CFD-DEM method. The loss mass of fines during erosion, the fines distribution in the central section, the GSD curves in different layers of specimen from macroscopic perspective are studied. The micro contact and force fabric information are obtained to further explore the influence of particle shape on suffusion. Additionally, an in-house CFD-DEM code with GPU parallel computing technique is developed. The simulation results indicate that particle shape has an inhibitory effect on erosion rate. This work would provide evidence for further development of phenomenological model and micro mechanical constitutive model to solve complicated engineering problems involving multi-field and multi-phase media.