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Measuring the evolution of contact fabric in shear bands with X-ray tomography

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Abstract

Numerous studies have shown that the fabric of granular materials plays a fundamental role in its macroscopic behaviour. Due to technical limitations, this fabric remained inaccessible in real experiments until recently when X-ray tomography became accessible. However, determining the fabric from tomographic images is relatively challenging, due to various inherent imaging properties. Triaxial experiments on natural sands are chosen to investigate the contact fabric evolution. Two different observation windows in the specimen are chosen for the contact fabric analysis: one inside and another one outside a shear band. Individual contact orientations are measured using advanced image analysis approaches within these windows. The fabric is then statistically captured using a second-order tensor, and the evolution of its anisotropy is related to the macroscopic behaviour.

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Notes

  1. Two geometrical entities that can be determined accurately.

  2. An 8-bit image has 0–255 values.

  3. In this experimental set-up, the bottom platen moves upwards to induce shear.

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Acknowledgements

Laboratoire 3SR is part of the LabEx Tec 21 (Investissements d’Avenir—Grant Agreement No. ANR-11-LABX-0030). We thank the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) at TU Dresden for generous allocations of computational resources. We thank Yannis F. Dafalias for inspiring this work.

Funding

The research leading to these results has received funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) no. HE2933/8-1 and from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program FP7-ERC-IDEAS Advanced Grant Agreement No. 290963 (SOMEF).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Max Wiebicke & Ivo Herle

  2. Grenoble INP, CNRS, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, 3SR, 38000, Grenoble, France

    Max Wiebicke, Edward Andò & Gioacchino Viggiani

Authors
  1. Max Wiebicke
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  2. Edward Andò
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  3. Gioacchino Viggiani
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  4. Ivo Herle
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Correspondence to Max Wiebicke.

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Wiebicke, M., Andò, E., Viggiani, G. et al. Measuring the evolution of contact fabric in shear bands with X-ray tomography. Acta Geotech. 15, 79–93 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11440-019-00869-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11440-019-00869-9

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