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Alignment and anisotropy of stresses in disordered granular media

Aashish K. Gupta1,*, Christopher Ness1,†, and Sina Haeri1,2,‡

  • *Contact author: aashish.gupta@ed.ac.uk
  • †Contact author: chris.ness@ed.ac.uk
  • ‡Contact author: s.haeri@hrwallingford.com
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Phys. Rev. E 112, 055422 – Published 24 November, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/db23-mlhw

Abstract

Characterizing the degeneracy of local stress states is a central challenge in obtaining the complete statistical mechanics of disordered media. Here, we introduce a minimal force-balance model for isolated granular clusters to probe the structure of the stress space through principal stress orientation and stress anisotropy. We further show that when complemented by physically motivated pairwise constraints, the model produces predictions for the stress alignment in packings of repulsive hard spheres. We compare these predictions against simulation data for grains in hopper and simple shear flows, finding qualitative agreement. This demonstrates the promise of modeling bulk athermal disordered systems through the combinatorics of few primitive geometric motifs.

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Phys. Rev. E 112, 055422– Published 24 November, 2025
  • Received 4 June 2025
  • Accepted 6 November 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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