Abstract
A study has been made of the micro mechanical origins of hardening in aggregates which comprise elastic-brittle grains. We consider the compression of an aggregate of uniform grains and explain hardening at very small strains in terms of elastic contacts between particles. In the discipline of soil mechanics the terms “yielding” and “plastic hardening” are used to describe the post-elastic behaviour of granular media. Here we propose mechanisms of “clastic yielding” which is the onset of fracture of the weakest particles in the aggregate, followed by “clastic hardening”, whereby particles split probabilistically depending on the applied macroscopic stress and the coordination number and size of each particle. This results in the development of a fractal geometry, and the subsequent unload-reload behaviour of such a material will be strongly affected by the disparity in sizes of neighbouring particles.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Bolton, M.D., McDowell, G.R. (1997). Clastic Mechanics. In: Fleck, N.A., Cocks, A.C.F. (eds) IUTAM Symposium on Mechanics of Granular and Porous Materials. Solid Mechanics and its Applications, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5520-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5520-5_4
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