Associate Professor Chris Wensrich

The unique and unusual state of matter represented by granular materials has historically made it very difficult to develop models of stress distributions and was previously not able to be explored experimentally in the required detail. This paper reports the application of the neutron diffraction strain scanning method, originally developed for residual stress measurements within engineering components, to the problem of the stress distribution in granular Fe under a consolidating pressure. Strains were measured in axial, radial, circumferential and an oblique direction using the neutron strain scanning diffractometer KOWARI at ANSTO (Sydney). The full stress tensor as a function of position was able to be extracted for both straight walled, converging and stepped dies. © (2014) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland.

The physical nature of contact moments within granular assemblies is reviewed and a new approach is developed for the homogenisation of stress within these materials. This approach revolves around capturing the effects of contact moments through the concept of contact eccentricity. By this method it is possible to calculate an expression for bulk stress that is both symmetric for material in equilibrium and fully consistent with the usual definition of bulk stress as an ensemble average of material stress over a representative volume element. The technique is demonstrated in a simple two dimensional example, as well as a larger scale discrete element modelling simulation of a steady state direct shear experiment. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

© 2014 American Physical Society.The full triaxial stress state within individual particles in a monodisperse spherical granular assembly has been measured. This was made possible by neutron imaging and computed tomography combined with neutron diffraction strain measurement techniques and associated stress reconstruction. The assembly in question consists of 549 precision steel ball bearings under an applied axial load of 85 MPa in a cylindrical die. Clear evidence of force chains was observed in terms of both the shape of the probability distribution function for normal stresses and the network formed by highly loaded particles. An extensive analysis of the source and magnitude of uncertainty in these measurements is also presented.

© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Expressions for bulk stress within a granular material in a dynamic setting are reviewed and explicitly derived for assemblies of three dimensional arbitrary shaped particles. By employing classical continuum and rigid body mechanics, the mean stress tensor for a single particle is separated into three distinct components; the familiar Love-Webber formula describing the direct effect of contacts, a component due to the net unbalanced moment arising from contact and a symmetric term due to the centripetal acceleration of material within the particle. A case is made that the latter term be ignored without exception when determining bulk stress within an assembly of particles. In the absence of this centripetal term an important observation is made regarding the nature of the symmetry in the stress tensor for certain types of particles; in the case of particles with cubic symmetry, the effects of dynamics on the bulk stress in an assembly is captured by an entirely skew-symmetric tensor. In this situation, it is recognised that the symmetric part of the Love-Webber formula is all that is required for defining the mean stress tensor within an assembly - regardless of the dynamics of the system.

Model validation remains a serious problem within the field of computational granular materials research. In all cases the rigor of the validation process is entirely dependent on the quality and depth of the experimental data that forms the point of comparison. Neutron and X-ray diffraction methods offer the only quantitative non-contact method for determining the spatially resolved triaxial stress field within granular materials under load. Measurements such as this can provide an unprecedented level of detail that will be invaluable in validating many models. In this paper the theoretical foundation underpinning diffraction-based strain measurements, their conversion to local stress in the particles and ultimately into the bulk stress field is developed. Effects such as elastic anisotropy within the particles of the granular material, particle plasticity and locally inhomogeneous stress distribution are shown to not offer any obstacles to the method and a detailed treatment of the calculation of the bulk stresses from the particle stresses is given. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.