Grain breakage is of paramount importance for understanding the behaviour of granular materials used in various engineering applications, such as pavements, roads, rail tracks, the oil and gas industry, and mineral processing. Changes to grain properties of a uniformly graded sand specimen stemming from breakage during compression were studied with the aid of three-dimensional Synchrotron Radiation-based Micro-Computed Tomography. The fast scanning and high-resolution 4D imaging were utilised to capture images from the interior body of the granular assembly during loading. The fractal distribution of the sand assembly showed that breakage becomes dominant in smaller grains rather than larger ones, where an increase in the amount of newly generated fine fragments leads to high coordination number surrounding the larger grains. More importantly, the results of morphological changes in the particulate assembly revealed that there is a reversal trend in the grain morphology evolution with increasing stress. The sand grains tended to create more spherical fragments with higher aspect ratio whereas by increasing the stress this trend completely shifted.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.