Effects of Rolling Resistance on Shear Behavior and Anisotropy of Granular Matters

Standard discrete element method does not take the effect of rolling resistance into account. To overcome this shortcoming, a contact model considering rolling resistance is developed and implemented into PFC2D. Using this contact model, a series of numerical biaxial compression tests are carried out. The results of these numerical simulations show that rolling resistance has remarkable effects on shear strength and shear dilatancy of granular matters, and these trends are agreed with previous studies, which proves that this model works well. Then the effect of rolling resistance on anisotropy of granular matters is studied in this paper. It can be seen that rolling resistance has dramatic effect on the anisotropy of granular matters. The anisotropy of granular matters increases with rolling resistance.