Macroscopic softening in granular materials from a mesoscale perspective

Abstract Stress-oftening is one of the significant features experienced by cohesive-frictional granular materials subjected to deviatoric loading. This paper focuses on mesoscopic evolutions of the dense granular assembly during a typical drained biaxial test conducted by DEM, and proposes mesoscopically-based framework to interpret both hardening and softening mechanisms. In this context, force chains play a fundamental role as they form the strong contact phase in granular materials. Their geometrical and mechanical characteristics, as well as the surrounding structures, are defined and analyzed in terms of force chain bending evolution, local dilatancy, rotation and non-coaxiality between the principal stress and the geometrical orientation of force chains. By distinguishing two zones inside and outside shear band, force chain rotations are shown to be of opposite sign, which may contribute to the observed macroscopic softening as one of the origin of the structural softening.