Tt. Ng et E. Petrakis, SMALL-STRAIN RESPONSE OF RANDOM ARRAYS OF SPHERES USING DISCRETE ELEMENT METHOD, Journal of engineering mechanics, 122(3), 1996, pp. 239-244
Granular soil is represented in this work by a three-dimensional rando
m array of rough quartz spheres using the discrete element method. Thr
ee-dimensional simulations have previously been performed to study the
dynamic small-strain behavior as well as the large-strain behavior of
sand at macroscopic level. The three-dimensional small-strain simulat
ion presented herein includes the determination of constrained moduli
for isotropically and anisotropically loaded random arrays of spheres
at microscopic level. The results are in reasonable agreement with the
experiments performed on the large triaxial cubical specimen at the U
niversity of Texas. It is found that the change of the distribution of
contact forces plays a very important role in the above phenomena. Du
ring the simulations, the observed macroscopic response is related to
the microscopic phenomena at the interparticle contact level.