Failure of Cohesive Granular Columns: Friction and Contact Adhesion

Abstract

This contribution focuses on the influence of the existence of a debonding length onto the behaviour of a cohesive granular sample. We apply a contact dynamics algorithm to study the effect of both contact adhesion strength and debonding length on the failure of a cohesive step, analysing a set of independent simulations. Contact adhesion strength coincides with stronger pile stability and larger apparent friction in the absence of any debonding length. We show that the existence of a larger debonding length amplifies this phenomenology. At large adhesion strength, we observe the existence of a sharp modification of the behaviour of the system even in the case of a very small debounding length, compared to the case of the absence of the latter. We compare the performance of the algorithm in the different cases, and show how increasing the debonding length leads to a better precision of the hard-core.

Full Paper