Anisotropy of force distributions in sheared soft particle systems

Abstract

In this numerical study, measurements of the contact forces inside a periodic two-dimensional sheared system of soft frictional particles are reported. The distribution of normalized normal forces exhibits a gradual broadening with increasing the pure shear deformation, leading to a slower decay for large forces. The process however slows down and the distribution approaches an invariant shape at high shear deformations. By introducing the joint probability distribution in sheared configurations, it is shown that for a fixed direction, the force distribution decays faster than exponentially even in a sheared system. The overall broadening can be attributed to the averaging over different directions in the presence of shear-induced stress anisotropy. The distribution of normalized tangential forces almost preserves its shape for arbitrary applied strain.