Abstract
Structural characteristics of two-dimensional elliptic granular packs with various aspect ratios and intergranular friction coefficients were studied using the Discrete Element Method (DEM). Isotropic compaction from random unjammed state leads to a jammed state with polycrystals of orientationally ordered clusters (OOC). The OOCs were identified using a cluster labelling algorithm, based on the relative angle Δθ between the major axes of two contacting particles. The threshold value of Δθ was optimised to give the strongest correlation between OOCs and the force chain network. We found that the resulting OOC size distribution decays algebraically with an exponent of −2, independently of grain aspect ratio and material properties.
Highlights
The microstructural characteristics of granular materials play an important role in determining their macroscopic properties and behaviours
The aim of this paper is to investigate orientationally ordered clusters (OOCs) of two-dimensional elliptic particles on the grain-scale
We define clusters on the basis of the relative orientation of contacting grain pairs, with a threshold chosen to give the strongest correlation between OOCs and the force chain network
Summary
The microstructural characteristics of granular materials play an important role in determining their macroscopic properties and behaviours. Particles in granular materials are often treated as disk or sphere in two- and three-dimension, leading to considerable progress, both theoretically [1,2,3], experimentally [4, 5] and numerically [4, 6,7,8] This simplification makes it impossible to study a key issue: that grain shapes play a central role in, and correlates strongly with, the macroscopic structural characteristics [9,10,11,12,13]. In systems with large aspect ratios and low intergranular friction, contacts between pairs with small relative angle ∆θ are more likely to carry large contact forces and vice versa. Similar relation between contact forces and local grain shapes were observed numerically [15, 16] and experimentally [17, 18]
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