Particle Crushing and Deformation Behaviour

Abstract

Particle breakage occurs in granular materials with various engineering applications, such as when driving piles (especially where the strength of the particles is low) and in debris flows (where the energy levels are high), and the influence of this breakage on the mechanical behaviour of soils should be given proper consideration in a constitutive model for soils. Particle breakage results in an increase in the number of fine particles and broadens the grading of particle sizes, and the primary effect of broadening the grading is to lower the critical state line and other characteristics of the volumetric response in the compression plane. In our study, an existing constitutive model, the Severn-Trent sand model, in which the critical state line plays a central role as the locus of asymptotic states, has been extended to include the effects of particle breakage. Severn-Trent sand is a frictional hardening Mohr-Coulomb model described within a kinematic hardening, bounding surface framework. The central assumption is that strength is seen as a variable quantity, dependent on the current value of the state parameter (volumetric distance from the critical state line) which varies with changes in density and stress levels. If the critical state line falls as a result of broadening grading, the state parameter tends to increase and the soil feels looser.