Shear Propagation in Sand System

Shear propagation and formation of sheared region in a sand system are investigated by a simulation. Our experimental apparatus for sand system is one of the simplest sets in order to obtain shear pattern, called as linear split-bottom cell. In this paper we give an analysis based on simulation for the above-mentioned system. Although a sand particle has a variety of forms from sphere to needle in general, but here we assume an ensemble of the simplest shape such as cubes in a rectangular parallelpipe split into two halves. One of the halves is moved along the split quasi-statically. We obtain a pattern of shear region and various quantities obtained from our simulation are compared with experiments.