Influence of particle shape on shear stress in granular media

Abstract

We analyze the contact and force networks in a dense confined packing of pentagonal particles simulated by means of the contact dynamics method. The particle shape effect is evidenced by comparing the data from pentagon packing and from a packing with identical characteristics except for the circular shape of the particles. A surprising observation is that the pentagon packing develops a lower structural anisotropy than the disk packing. We show in this work that this weakness is compensated by a higher force anisotropy that leads to enhanced shear strength of the pentagon packing. With the polygonal shape of the particles, the strong force chains are mostly composed of edge-to-edge contacts with a marked zig-zag aspect.