Study on strong contact system by sub-network partitioning method for binary mixtures

Abstract

The contact network of binary mixtures can be divided into three contact sub-networks according to the branch vector length. A new method has been proposed for partitioning strong contact in binary mixtures. This method is based on the mean contact force of each sub-networks and is different from the conventional partitioning method, which is based on the mean contact force of the whole-network. A series of triaxial compression numerical tests were conducted on binary mixtures with different fine content (FC). The strong contact system in both the sub-network partitioning and the whole-network partitioning methods was studied. In some cases, certain coarse-coarse contacts that were identified as strong in the whole-network partitioning method were found to be weak in the sub-network partitioning method. Conversely, some coarse-fine and fine-fine contacts that were weak contacts in the whole-network partitioning method were identified as strong contacts in the sub-network partitioning method. In the sub-network partitioning method, the contribution of strong contacts to both axial and radial stress is lower than that observed in the whole-network partitioning method. Additionally, when considering branch vector length in the sub-network weighting parameters, there is a unique fabric-stress relationship was observed for different FC.