Behavior of granular materials under cyclic shear

The design and development of a parallel plate shear cell for the study of large-scale shear flows in granular materials is presented. The parallel plate geometry allows for shear studies without the effects of curvature found in the more common Couette experiments. A system of independently movable slats creates a well with side walls that deform in response to the motions of grains within the pack. This allows for true parallel plate shear with minimal interference from the containing geometry. The motions of the side walls also allow for a direct measurement of the velocity profile across the granular pack. Results are presented for applying this system to the study of transients in granular shear and for shear-induced crystallization. Initial shear profiles are found to vary from packing to packing, ranging from a linear profile across the entire system to an exponential decay with a width of approximately six bead diameters. As the system is sheared, the velocity profile becomes much sharper, resembling an exponential decay with a width of roughly three bead diameters. Further shearing produces velocity profiles which can no longer be fit to an exponential decay, but are better represented as a Gaussian decay or error function profile. Cyclic shear is found to produce large-scale ordering of the granular pack, which has a profound impact on the shear profile. There exist periods of time in which there is slipping between layers as well as periods of time in which the layered particles lock together resulting in very little relative motion.