Refraction of shear zones in granular materials

Abstract

We study strain localization in slow shear flow focusing on layered granular materials. A heretofore unknown effect is presented here. We show that shear zones are refracted at material interfaces in analogy with refraction of light beams in optics. This phenomenon can be obtained as a consequence of a recent variational model of shear zones. The predictions of the model are tested and confirmed by 3D discrete element simulations. We found that shear zones follow Snell's law of light refraction.

arXiv comment4 pages, 3 figures, minor changes, jounal ref. added

References in corpus (6)

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• Shear band formation in granular media as a variational problem
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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Packing, alignment and flow of shape-anisotropic grains in a 3D silo experiment
• Shear zones in granular media: 3D Contact Dynamics simulation
• Coexistence and Transition between Shear Zones in Slow Granular Flows
• An adaptive hierarchical domain decomposition method for parallel contact dynamics simulations of granular materials
• Reflection and Exclusion of Shear Zones in Inhomogeneous Granular Materials
• Snell's Law for Shear Zone Refraction in Granular Materials
• Gravity Governs Shear Localization in Confined Dense Granular Flows
• Evolution of shear zones in granular packings under pressure
• Bounds on the shear load of cohesionless granular matter
• Convective Flows in Sheared Packings of Spherical Particles