A cohesive granular material with tunable elasticity

Abstract

By mixing glass beads with a curable polymer we create a well-defined cohesive granular medium, held together by solidified, and hence elastic, capillary bridges. This material has a geometry similar to a wet packing of beads, but with an additional control over the elasticity of the bonds holding the particles together. We show that its mechanical response can be varied over several orders of magnitude by adjusting the size and stiffness of the bridges, and the size of the particles. We also investigate its mechanism of failure under unconfined uniaxial compression in combination with in situ x-ray microtomography. We show that a broad linear-elastic regime ends at a limiting strain of about 8%, whatever the stiffness of the agglomerate, which corresponds to the beginning of shear failure. The possibility to finely tune the stiffness, size and shape of this simple material makes it an ideal model system for investigations on, for example, fracturing of porous rocks, seismology, or root growth in cohesive porous media.

13 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Onset of mechanical stability in random packings of frictional spheres
• Fragmentation processes in impact of spheres

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• The effects of interparticle cohesion on the collapse of granular columns
• Crossover from viscous fingering to fracturing in cohesive wet granular media: a photoporomechanics study
• Anisotropic Particles Strengthen Granular Pillars under Compression
• Measuring and upscaling micromechanical interactions in a cohesive granular material
• Tunable mechanical properties and air-based lubrication in an acoustically levitated granular material