Abstract
The volume of scrap tyres, an undesired urban waste, is increasing rapidly in every country. Mixing sand and rubber particles as a lightweight backfill is one of the possible alternatives to avoid stockpiling them in the environment. This paper presents a minimal model aiming to capture the evolution of the void ratio of sand-rubber mixtures undergoing an isotropic compression loading. It is based on the idea that, submitted to a pressure, the rubber chips deform and partially fill the porous space of the system, leading to a decrease of the void ratio with increasing pressure. Our simple approach is capable of reproducing experimental data for two types of sand (a rounded one and a sub-angular one) and up to mixtures composed of 50% of rubber.
Highlights
To derive our model we consider granular packings made of sand grains and rubber chips
What happens for volume ratios of rubber greater than 0.5? Is our model still valid? Second, how can we adapt our model for packings where sand and rubber particles have different size distributions? Third, as mentioned above, a direct measurement of the deformed fraction of rubber f would be an ultimate test for our model
We derived a model aiming to predict the behaviour of mixtures of sand grains and rubber chips undergoing isotropic compression
Summary
To derive our model we consider granular packings made of sand grains and rubber chips. The void ratio is classically defined as e = VV /Vsol, where VV and Vsol are respectively the volume of the porous space and the volume of solids (i.e. the volume of the rubber chips and of the sand grains) Contrary to the former volume, the latter depends neither on the volume ratio of rubber, nor on the pressure. Our model predicts that the void ratio decreases with the pressure according to the following equation: e(xR, p) =e(xR = 0, p) − xR f ∗ This prediction requires the knowledge of (i) the evolution of the void ratio versus the pressure for a 100% sand sample (ii) the characteristic pressure, p0, and (iii) the maximal deformed fraction of rubber, F. Since these three prerequisites depend on the type of sand used, it is necessary to test our model using at least two types of sand
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