Effect of grain crushing on shear localization in granular bodies during plane strain compression

This article deals with the effect of grain crushing on shear localization in granular materials during plane strain monotonic compression tests under constant lateral pressure. The grain diameter and the initial void ratio were stochastically distributed using a spatial correlation. To describe the mechanical behavior of cohesionless granular materials during a monotonic deformation path in plane strain compression, we used a micropolar hypoplastic constitutive model that is able to describe the salient properties of granular bodies including shear localization. The model was extended by introducing changes to the grain diameter with varying pressure using formulae from breakage mechanics proposed for crushable granulates. The initial void ratios and grain diameters took the form of correlated random spatial fields described by both symmetric and nonsymmetric random distributions using a homogeneous correlation function. The field realizations were generated with the help of an original conditional rejection method. A few representative samples of the random fields selected from the generated set were taken into account in numerical calculations. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.