Granular or particulate materials arise in almost every aspect of our lives, including many familiar materials such as tea, coffee, sugar, sand, cement and powders. At some stage almost every industrial process involves a particulate material, and it is usually the cause of the disruption to the smooth running of the process. In the natural environment, understanding the behaviour of particulate materials is vital in many geophysical processes such as earthquakes, landslides and avalanches. This book is a collection of current research from some of the major contributors in the topic of modelling the behaviour of granular materials. Papers from every area of current activity are included, such as theoretical, numerical, engineering and computational approaches. This book illustrates the numerous diverse approaches to one of the outstanding problems of modern continuum mechanics.

Coulomb read his Essai on ?some statical problems? to the French Academy in 1773. It is a document of great importance in the history of engineering since it laid the foundations of the modern science of soil mechanics and also discussed three other major problems of eighteenth-century civil engineering: the bending of beams, the fracture of columns and the calculation of abutment thrusts developed by masonry arches.Professor Heyman's book makes the Essai accessible to a wide range of engineers and historians of technology. It is here reproduced in full with an annotated English translation, a chapter elucidating Coulomb's references and with full discussion of the technical problems it treats. It concludes with some brief historical notes on Coulomb's life and technical education in eighteenth-century France.

This book presents a complete and comprehensive analysis of the behaviour of granular materials including the description of experimental results, the different ways to define the global behaviour from local phenomena at the particle scale, the various modellings which can be used for a D.E.M. analysis to solve practical problems and finally the analysis of strain localisation. The concepts developed in this book are applicable to many kinds of granular materials considered in civil, mechanical or chemical engineering.

This volume constitutes the Proceedings of the IUT AM Symposium on Mechanics of Granular and Porous Materials, held in Cambridge from 15th to 17th July 1996. The objectives were: 1. To review existing experimental results and practical phenomena on the flow and compaction of particulate media; 2. To review the current state of constitutive models, and their implementation for predicting the macroscopic response. 3. Identification of the shortcomings of existing models and procedures in understanding practical phenomena. The Symposium brought together the research communities of solid mechanics, materials science, geomechanics, chemical engineering and mathematics to review current knowledge of the flow and compaction of granular and porous media. The meeting emphasised the development and use of constitutive laws to model practical processes such as mixing, drainage and drying, compaction of metal and ceramic powders and soils, and instabilities associated with these processes. A common theme was to develop constitutive models from an understanding of the underlying physical mechanisms of deformation and fracture. It was particularly rewarding to find that the separate research communities came together during the meeting and came to a consensus as to the main mechanisms of deformation and failure of particulate and porous solids.

This monograph covers phenomena of deformation and machining of granular media: macroscopic particles of different size, shape, and surface properties which typically exhibit behavior similar to fluids, as well as the behavior of solids under deformation. The book analyses the behavior of granular media in soils, rocks and stones, metals and various synthetic materials, presenting a theoretical description, applications and understanding of basic phenomena in granular matter.

This book sets out the basic materials science needed for understanding the plastic deformation of rocks and minerals. Although at atmospheric pressure or at relatively low environmental pressures, these materials tend to be brittle, that is, to fracture with little prior plastic deformation when non-hydrostatically stressed, they can undergo substantial permanent strain when stressed under environmental conditions of high confining pressure and high temperature, such as occur geologically in the Earth’s crust and upper mantle. Thus the plastic deformation of rocks and minerals is of fundamental interest in structural geology and geodynamics. In mountain-building processes and during convective stirring in the Earth’s mantle, rocks can undergo very large amounts of plastic flow, accompanied by substantial changes in microstructure. These changes in microstructure remain in the rocks as evidence of the past deformation history. There are a number of types of physical processes whereby rock and minerals can undergo deformation under geological conditions. The physics of these processes is set out in this book.

Inelastic Analysis of Solids and Structures presents in a unified manner the physical and theoretical background of inelastic material models and computational methods, and illustrates the behavior of the models in typical engineering conditions. The book describes experimental observations and principles of mechanics, and efficient computational algorithms for stress calculations as typically performed in finite element analysis. The theoretical background is given to an extent necessary to describe the commonly employed material models in metal isotropic and orthotropic plasticity, thermoplasticity and viscoplasticity, and the plasticity of geological materials. The computational algorithms are developed in a unified manner with some detailed derivations of the algorithmic relations. Many solved examples are presented, which are designed to give insight into the material behavior in various engineering conditions, and to demonstrate the application of the computational algorithms.

Fundamentals of Continuum Mechanics of Soils provides a long-needed general scheme for the study of the important yet problematic material of soil. It closes the gap between two disciplines, soil mechanics and con- tinuum mechanics, showing that the familiar concepts of soil mechanics evolve directly from continuum mechanics. It confirms concepts such as pore pressures, cohesion and dependence of the shear stress on consolidation, and rejects the view that continuum mechanics cannot be applied to a material such as soil. The general concepts of continuum mechanics, field equations and constitutive equations are discussed. It is shown how the theory of mixtures evolves from these equations and how, along with energetics and irrevers- ible thermodynamics, it can be applied to soils. The discussion also sheds light on some aspects of mechanics of materials, especially compressible materials. Examples are the introduction of the Hencky measure of strain, the requirement of dual constitutive equations, and the dependence of the spent internal energy on the stored internal energy. Researchers in engineering mechanics and material sciences may find that the results of experiments on soils can be generalized and extended to other materials. The book is a reference text for students familiar with the fundamentals of mechanics, for scholars of soil engineering, and for soil scientists. It is also suitable as an advanced undergraduate course in soil mechanics.