Micromechanical analysis on anisotropic deformation of granular soils

미시역학을 이용한 사질토의 이방적 변형 특성의 해석

Anisotropic characteristics of deformation are important to understand the particular behavior in the pre-failure state of soils. Recent experiments shows that cross-anisotropic moduli of granular soils can be expressed by functions of normal stresses in the corresponding directions, which is closely linked to micromechanical characteristics of particles. Granular soils are composed of a number of particles so that the force-displacement relationship at each contact point governs the macroscopic stress-strain relationship. Therefore, the micromechanical approach in which the deformation of granular soils is regarded as a mutual interaction between particle contacts is one of the best ways to investigate the anisotropic deformation of soils. In this study, a numerical program based on the theory of micromechanics is developed. Modified Hertz-Mindlin model is adopted to represent the force-displacement relationship in each contact point for the realistic prediction of anisotropic moduli. To evaluate the model parameters, a set of analytical solutions of anisotropic moduli is derived in the isotropic stress condition. By comparing the analytical solutions with exact values, we confirm that the analytical solutions can be utilized to evaluate model parameters within the acceptable range of error of 10%.