Study of triaxial loading of segregated granular assemblies through experiments and DEM simulations

A novel position-dependent body force-based confinement for simulating triaxial tests using the Discrete Element Method is presented. The said method is used to perform triaxial simulations on mono-disperse and segregated assemblies of glass spheres. The macroscopic load response obtained in simulations is validated with the experimental load response. A mesh construction algorithm is presented to check whether the confinement applied in the triaxial simulations is accurate. The particle displacement data obtained from triaxial simulations are used to obtain a particle-wise average strain tensor. This is further used to compare the strain localisation between the mono-disperse and segregated assemblies. It is observed that, in the segregated assembly, the interface between the two particle phases acts as a barrier for strain localisation, and the smaller particles preferentially undergo a higher degree of shear strain on average.