Local coulomb versus global failure criterion for granular packings†
Abstract
Contacts at the Coulomb threshold are unstable to tangential perturbations and thus contribute to failure at the microscopic level. How is such a local property related to global failure, beyond the effective picture given by a Mohr–Coulomb type failure criterion? Here, we use a simulated bed of frictional disks slowly tilted under the action of gravity to investigate the link between the avalanche process and a global generalized isostaticity criterion. The avalanche starts when the packing as a whole is still stable according to this criterion, underlining the role of large heterogeneities in the destabilizing process: the
- This article is part of the themed collection: Granular and jammed materials