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Experimental investigation of shear strength of sands with inherent fabric anisotropy

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Abstract

Loading direction-dependent strength of sand has been traditionally characterized in the principal stress space as a direct extension of the Mohr–Coulomb criterion. A recent study found that it is more appropriate to define anisotropic strength of sand on failure/shear planes, but this proposition has only been demonstrated with discrete element method (DEM) simulations. The present study experimentally investigates anisotropic shear strength of sands in this new framework. Three granular materials with distinct grain characteristics ranging from smooth and rounded particles to flaky and angular particles are tested with the bedding plane inclination angle ψ b varying over the full range of 0°–180°. The main objective is to study how the peak friction angle ϕ p of sand is affected by the ψ b angle and how the ψ bϕ p relationship evolves with the change of characteristics of constituent sand particles. We find that the general trend of ψ bϕ p curves for real sands resembles what was predicted by DEM in a previous study, whereas rich anisotropic strength behavior is revealed by the laboratory data. The effects of normal stress and initial density, as well as shear dilation behavior at different shear directions, are also studied.

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Acknowledgments

This work was made possible through extensive international collaboration. The laboratory work was performed by Tong and Zhou at Beihang University, supported by National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (contract number 2014CB047006), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (contract number 8133053) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (contract number 10902005 and 51079075). Fu’s work was partly performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344 (LLNL release number: LLNL-JRNL-564293). Y. F. Dafalias acknowledges support by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC IDEAS Advanced Grant Agreement No. 290963 (SOMEF) and partial support by the US NSF project CMMI-1162096.

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Correspondence to Pengcheng Fu.

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Tong, Z., Fu, P., Zhou, S. et al. Experimental investigation of shear strength of sands with inherent fabric anisotropy. Acta Geotech. 9, 257–275 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11440-014-0303-6

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