The Development of a New Soil Particle Loading Apparatus

Description

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in the behaviour of soils when viewed as particulate materials, the traditional approach being to treat them as continua. However, our understanding of the behaviour of soil particles at their contacts is quite poor and so the mechanics included in, for example, Discrete Element Models of soils are relatively crude. The project therefore aims to construct new generation of apparatus to investigate the combined effects of normal and tangential loading at the contacts between soil particles. This will give both an improved insight into the behaviour of soils when viewed as a continuum and lead to more sophisticated contact models for particle interactions.