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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Failure of an effective stress approach in polydisperse wet granular materials

David Cantor1,2,*, Emilien Azéma3,4,†, and Carlos Ovalle1,2,‡

  • 1Department of Civil, Geological, and Mining Engineering, Polytechnique Montréal H3T 1J4, Canada
  • 2Research Institute on Mining and Environment, RIME UQAT-Polytechnique, Montréal H3T 1J4, Canada
  • 3LMGC, Université de Montpellier, CNRS, Montpellier 34090, France
  • 4Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), Paris 75005, France

  • *david.cantor@polymtl.ca
  • †emilien.azema@umontpellier.fr
  • ‡carlos.ovalle@polymtl.ca
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Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022008 – Published 8 April, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.L022008

Abstract

In this Letter, the effective stress principle (ESP)—originally developed for granular materials saturated with water and recently extended to unsaturated ones via simulations—is shown to fail once the material presents wide grain size distributions. We demonstrate that the current ESP approaches cannot capture the Mohr-Coulomb strength parameters as soon as the grain size span exceeds dmax/dmin∼4. This failure is attributed to significant differences in the fabric generated by solid interactions in the wet material, which are supposedly capable of matching the characteristics of the dry material. We show that a generalization of the ESP requires not only macroscopic considerations but also direct attention to the nature of contact and force networks.

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Phys. Rev. Research 6, L022008– Published 8 April, 2024
  • Received 17 June 2023
  • Accepted 23 January 2024
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