Elastic behavior of weakly cemented contact

Vincent Langlois (1)

1 LGE - Laboratoire Géomatériaux et Environnement

We investigate the elastic behavior of weakly cemented contact. We show that the radial distribution of stresses and the stiffnesses of a cemented contact are governed by the ratio a/R, where R, a and are respectively the grain radius, the contact size, and the ratio of the elastic moduli of cement and grains. Moreover, we show that a cemented contact is always less stiff than a Hertzian contact having a similar size. Finally, we propose accurate approximate expressions of the contact stiffnesses.

Mots clés: granular materials; Contact cement theory; contact theory

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]; Mécanique des matériaux [physics.class-ph]; Matière Molle [cond-mat.soft]

Vincent Langlois. Elastic behavior of weakly cemented contact. International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics, 2014, to appear, pp.1-7. ⟨10.1002/nag.2342⟩. ⟨hal-01104354⟩