Modeling the Particle Breakage via Breakage Energy during Triaxial Shearing

Rockfill materials are widely used as foundation in construction and different degrees of par-ticle breakage inevitably show different characteristics. The breakage index (e.g., Marsal break-age index, Bg) of rockfill materials directly measured though experimental method naturally has an intrinsic correlation with the physical description applied by theoretical method (e.g., breakage energy, Eb) for the same process of crushing. Eb back-calculated by the incre-mental energy equations of Ueng's models may be violating the law of irreversibility for energy accumulation because they treat the critical friction ratio Mc as a constant. This can be solved by constructing a function express that resets the friction ratio as a variable related to shear strain and critical state friction ratio. By utilizing experimental data of three kinds of granular aggregates, it was found that Bg is proportional to the increase of Eb, regardless of whether shear strains are during shearing or after. The method proposed in this paper can be used to calculate the effect of particle breakage in the whole shear process without multiple tests.