In order to design civil structures that are supported by soils, the shear strength parameters of soils are required. Due to the large particle size of coarse-grained soils, large direct shear tests should be performed. In this study, large direct shear tests on three types of coarse grained soils (4.5 mm, 7.9 mm, and 15.9 mm) were performed to evaluate the effects of particle size on the shear...

In contrast to most fluids, flowing powders do not exhibit viscosity such that a Newtonian rheology cannot accurately describe granular flow. Assuming that the material is incompressible, dry, cohesionless, and perfectly rigid-plastic, generalized Navier-Stokes equations (’Schaeffer Model’) have been derived where the velocity gradient has been replaced by the shear rate, and the viscosity depe...

A novel method is proposed for controlling and reducing friction in thin-film boundary lubricated junctions, through coupling of small amplitude (of the order of 1 Å) directional mechanical oscillations of the confining boundaries to the molecular degrees of freedom of the sheared interfacial lubricating fluid. Extensive grandcanonical molecular dynamics simulations revealed the nature of dynam...

Destructive large earthquakes occur as dynamic frictional ruptures along pre-existing interfaces (or faults) in the Earth’s crust. One of the important issues in earthquake dynamics is the local duration of relative displacement or slip. Seismic inversions show that earthquakes may propagate as selfhealing pulse-like ruptures, with local slip duration being much shorter than the overall rupture...

Shear induced alignment of elongated particles is studied experimentally and numerically. We show that shear alignment of ensembles of macroscopic particles is comparable even on a quantitative level to simple molecular systems, despite the completely different types of particle interactions. We demonstrate that for dry elongated grains the preferred orientation forms a small angle with the str...

Bottom boundary layer effects on the linear wave propagation over mild slope bottoms are analyzed. A modifiedWKB approximation is presented including boundary layer effects. Within the boundary layer, two cases are considered: laminar (constant viscosity) and turbulent. Boundary layer effects are introduced by coupling the velocity inside the boundary layer to the irrotational velocity in the c...

By means of extensive contact dynamics simulations, we analyze the combined effects of polydispersity both in particle size and in particle shape, defined as the degree of shape irregularity, on the shear strength and microstructure of sheared granular materials composed of pentagonal particles. We find that the shear strength is independent of the size span, but unexpectedly, it declines with ...

Two simple feedback control laws for drag reduction are derived by applying a suboptimal control theory to a turbulent channel flow. These new feedback control laws require pressure or shear-stress information only at the wall, and when applied to a turbulent channel flow at Reτ = 110, they result in 16–22% reduction in the skin-friction drag. More practical control laws requiring only the loca...

This paper describes a computational method to calculate the friction force between two rough surfaces. In the model used, friction results from forces developed during elastic deformation and shear resistance of adhesive junctions at the contact areas. Contacts occur between asperities and have arbitrary orientations with respect to the surfaces. The size and slope of each contact area depend ...

By means of numerical simulations, we show that assemblies of frictionless rigid pentagons in slow shear flow possess an internal friction coefficient (equal to 0.183±0.008 with our choice of moderately polydisperse grains) but no macroscopic dilatancy. In other words, despite side-side contacts tending to hinder relative particle rotations, the solid fraction under quasistatic shear coincides ...