Gyratory Shearing Compaction of Granular Materials

Abstract

In this letter, instead of investigating the compaction of granular materials under tapping or cyclic shearing, we focused more on the gyratory shearing compaction, where particles are subjected to constant pressure and shear rate continuously. Such a phenomenon is crucial to the compaction of asphalt mixtures or soil in civil engineering and can be extended to other areas, such as powder processing and pharmaceutical engineering. In this study, we found that the gyratory speed or interstitial fluid viscosity has almost no impact on the compaction behavior, while the pressure plays a more important role. Additionally, it is the inertial time scale which dictates the compaction behavior under gyratory shearing in most cases, whereas the viscous time scale can also have influence in some conditions.