DEM analysis of energy dissipation in crushable soils

Abstract It is well known that particle crushing plays a critical role in the mechanical behavior of granular soils. Understanding energy dissipation under the influence of particle breakage is of key importance to the development of micromechanics-based constitutive models for sands. This paper reports the original results of the energy input/dissipation of an idealized crushable soil using 3D DEM simulations. Particle breakage is modeled as the disintegration of the synthetic agglomerate particles which are made up of parallel-bonded elementary spheres. A parametric study is performed to fully investigate the effects of initial specimen density and crushability on the energy allocation of the crushable soil. The simulation results show that the initial specimen density and the crushability strongly affect the energy allocation of the soil both at small and large strains. The major roles of particle breakage, which itself only dissipates a negligible amount of input energy, are to advance changes in the soil fabric and to promote the interparticle friction dissipation. Particularly, at small strains, particle breakage disrupts the strain energy buildup, and thus, reduces the mobilized shear strength and dilatancy of a granular soil. At large strains, where particle breakage is greatly reduced, steady energy dissipation by interparticle friction and mechanical damping is observed. Furthermore, it is found that shear bands develop in most dense crushable specimens at large strains, but they are only weakly correlated to the anisotropy of the accumulated friction dissipation.