Three-Dimensional Evaluation of Sand Particle Fracture Using Discrete-Element Method and Synchrotron Microcomputed Tomography Images

Abstract

Recent research showed that fracture of sand particles plays a significant role in determining the plastic bulk volumetric changes of granular materials under different loading conditions. One of the major tools used to better understand the influence of particle fracture on the behavior of granular materials is discrete-element modeling (DEM). This paper employed the bonded block model (BBM) to simulate the fracture behavior of sand. Each sand particle is modeled as an agglomerate of rigid blocks bonded at their contacts using the linear-parallel contact model, which can transmit both moment and force. DEM simulated particles closely matched the actual three-dimensional (3D) shape of sand particles acquired using high-resolution 3D synchrotron microcomputed tomography (SMT). Results from unconfined one-dimensional (1D) compression of a single synthetic silica cube were used to calibrate the model parameters. Particle fracture was investigated for specimens composed of three sand particles that were loaded under confined 1D compression. Breakage energy measured from DEM models matched well with that measured experimentally. The paper studied the effects of contact loading condition and particle interaction on the fracture mode of particles using BBM that can closely capture the 3D shape of real sand particles.

Influence of the grain shape and packing texture on the primary porosity of sandstone: Insights from a numerical simulation

“…In this study, the particle flow code in PFC3D 7.0 was used to obtain the PPO of sandstone with different GSD, GPT and GS values. The advantage of using the DEM lies in its ability to strictly control the GS, grain‐size composition, force state and movement path of grains, and microscopic characteristics of the GPT in sandstone, which are often difficult to achieve in physical experiments (Das & Das, 2019; Jarrar et al ., 2020). Such advantages enable the shortcomings of previous studies to be overcome and to establish the influence of the GS, GSD and GPT on the PPO of sandstone.…”

“…In recent years, the DEM has been proven to be a powerful numerical method for quantitatively analysing the relationship between stress, grain‐size composition, grain crushing, grain deformation, GS and porosity during compaction (Cundall & Strack, 1979; Cil & Alshibli, 2014; Fu et al ., 2017; Jarrar et al ., 2020). In this study, the particle flow code in PFC3D 7.0 was used to obtain the PPO of sandstone with different GSD, GPT and GS values.…”

“…The surface area of an equivalent sphere with the same volume as the grain Jarrar et al, 2020). In this study, the particle flow code in PFC3D 7.0 was used to obtain the PPO of sandstone with different GSD, GPT and GS values.…”

Numerical simulation of mechanical compaction and pore evolution of sandstone considering particle breakage

“…In field of geotechnical and civil engineering, a variety of numerical simulation methods have been developed for the material damage. The simulation methods include Finite Element Method (FEM) (Turner et al, 2019;Zhou et al, 2021a) Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM) (Seyyedan et al, 2021;Zhou et al, 2021b), Peridynamics (PD) (Wang et al, 2016(Wang et al, , 2018Wan et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2021), General Particle Dynamics (GPD) (Zhou et al, 2014), cluster method based on Discrete Element Method (DEM) (Cil and Alshibli, 2014;Sun et al, 2018;Jarrar et al, 2020) and particle replacement method based on DEM (De Bono and Mcdowell, 2016;Zheng and Tannant, 2019;. FEM, XFEM, FD, GPD and cluster method can accurately simulate the breakage process and have a good application in the simulation of rock, single particle or a small number of particles.…”

Understanding the Anisotropic Mechanical Behavior of Single‐Crystalline Alpha Quartz From the Insight of Molecular Dynamics

“…Current geotechnical investigation has explored the constitutive behavior of sandstone at the individual or multi‐particle fracture scale (Jarrar et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2015), and grain contacts behavior (Cole & Hopkins, 2016; Sandeep et al., 2018). However, the reaction of silica sand elements to stress‐strain is fundamentally driven by their crystalline composition (Alshibli et al., 2013; Cole & Hopkins, 2016).…”