Crushing and Flooding Effects on One-Dimensional Time-Dependent Behaviors of a Granular Soil

Abstract

Particle crushing contributes significantly to the time-dependent compression behaviors of crushable granular soils. It is also widely accepted that flooding would aggravate the breakage level of soil particles. This study aims to investigate the combined behavior. A crushable granular soil was chosen to preform one-dimensional compression tests, i.e., constant-rate of strain tests and multistage loading oedometer tests, under dry and saturated conditions. Besides, the crushing mechanism of particles was investigated by measuring the microhardness of soil particles. Furthermore, the shape characteristics (circularity, aspect ratio, roundness and solidity) of particles before and after tests were analyzed by digital image processing (DIP) method. The results show that the "isotach" behavior is observed for the tested soil in saturated condition. The compression curve, creep behavior and level of particle breakage of initially dry specimens would evolve to the same manner in which the initially saturated specimens behave. The microhardness test clearly has attributed the breakage of particles to the disaggregation of clay minerals which are the bonding materials between micro-quartz particles. This disaggregation became more severe after the moisturization of soil particles. The plastic work done to each specimen and corresponding breakage ratio are correlated by two hyperbolic functions, which define two characteristic curves for dry and saturated/flooded conditions. The results from DIP analysis indicate that the average values of shape descriptors of all the particles in one specimen would change during compression, with a larger level under saturated or flooded condition than under dry condition.

Experimental Study on the Impact of Water Content on the Strength Parameters of Coral Gravelly Sand

“…It can be seen from Figure 14 that the relative breakage index of coral gravelly sand with different water contents gradually increased with the increasing plastic work, and the power function in Equation (4) can be used to express the increasing trend of relative breakage index with the increased plastic work. Lee and Coop [52] and Chen et al [53] studied the relationship between the relative breakage index and plastic work of terrigenous quartz sand and granite soil with different water contents, respectively, and also reached similar conclusions. α and β in Equation ( 4) are the coefficients related to the physical properties of the sample (i.e., mineral composition, particle size, gradation, strength and shape, density, water content, etc.)…”

Closure to “Effect of Grain Size Distribution of Sandy Soil on Shearing Behaviors at Soil–Structure Interface” by Han-Lin Wang, Wan-Huan Zhou, Zhen-Yu Yin, and Xi-Xi Jie

“…2(a)]. This suggests that the water content is also an important influential factor to the soil-structure interface behaviors, which is probably due to the easy particle crushing under saturated state (Yin et al 2017;Hu et al 2018;Chen et al 2020a). Relatively low values can also be identified for the interface friction angle in Liang et al (2017), in which the tests were conducted on soil with a relatively high water content (20%) for sandstone and mudstone.…”

A novel multi-scale large deformation approach for modelling of granular collapse

“…It has been recognized that debris flows and granular flows may behave similarly: for instance, they can sustain shear stresses with very slow deformation due to lasting, frictional grain contacts, and they can flow rapidly, sustaining inelastic grain collisions (Iverson, 1997;Fávero Neto et al, 2020). Thus, research has mainly focused on small scale laboratory experiments and numerical simulations of granular materials (Tan et al, 2019(Tan et al, , 2020Chen et al, 2019Chen et al, , 2020Lajeunesse et al, 2005;Crosta et al, 2009;Lube et al, 2005Lube et al, , 2004Rondon et al, 2011;Fern and Soga, 2017;Zhao et al, 2019;Brezzi et al, 2020;Kermani and Qiu, 2020). Among them, two classic experiments are widely performed: rectangular channel flowing tests and column flowing tests.…”