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Shear behaviour of snakeskin-inspired ribs and soil interfaces

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Abstract

The effect of the shape of snakeskin-inspired patterns on the shear behaviour of soil-continuum interfaces was investigated for their potential applications in geotechnical engineering. For this purpose, continuum surfaces with ribs inspired from the ventral scales of three different snakes, each with three intra-rib spacings, were fabricated using a 3D printer and their shear behaviour with sand and clay soils was tested under three normal stresses. The results of the interface direct shear tests show that snakeskin-inspired ribs mobilise higher interface shear resistance than an unpatterned surface in sand and clay and considerable inhomogeneous deformations at the interface. The type of soil, the applied normal stress, the shape of the ribs and the direction of shearing were found to be factors that influence and dictate the shear behaviour of the different ribbed interfaces. The snakeskin-inspired ribs mobilised considerable frictional anisotropy owing to the difference in their shapes in the shearing directions. The failure envelopes of the ribbed interfaces were found to follow a nonlinear trend and were described using a power curve. The efficiency of the sand-ribbed interfaces decreased with an increase in normal stress, while a reverse phenomenon was observed in clays, indicating that the interaction mechanism of the ribs is different in different soils for the direct shear test conditions. Digital Image Correlation technique on the sand interfaces revealed that a shear zone of thickness 11 times D50 of sand was mobilised at the interface, further confirming the inhomogeneous deformation at the interfaces.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The work is supported by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), India (Project code: SRG/2019/000561).

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  1. Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, 110016, India

    V. L. Gayathri & Prashanth Vangla

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Gayathri, V.L., Vangla, P. Shear behaviour of snakeskin-inspired ribs and soil interfaces. Acta Geotech. 19, 1397–1419 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11440-023-02009-w

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