The soft-disk model previously developed and applied by Durian [D. J. Durian, Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 4780 (1995)] is brought to bear on problems of foam rheology of longstanding and current interest, using two-dimensional systems. The questions at issue include the origin of the Herschel-Bulkley relation, normal stress effects (dilatancy), and localization in the presence of wall drag. We show th...

In this work, a predictive multiscale framework for modeling the behavior of granular materials is presented. The method is particularly attractive due to its simplicity and ability to exploit the existing finite element and computational inelasticity technologies. Furthermore, this semi-concurrent multiscale method extracts two key material parameters from the granular structure: dilatancy and...

Granular flows occur widely in nature and industry, yet a continuum description that captures their important features is yet not at hand. Recent experiments on granular materials sheared in a cylindrical Couette device revealed a puzzling anomaly, wherein all components of the stress rise nearly exponentially with depth. Here we show, using particle dynamics simulations and imaging experiments...

This work is devoted to the analysis of elasto-plasticity models arising in soil mechanics. Contrary to the typical models mainly used for metals, it is required here to take into account plastic dilatancy due to the sensitivity of granular materials to hydrostatic pressure. The yield criterion thus depends on the mean stress and the elasticity domain is unbounded and not invariant in the direc...

A triaxial constitutive model is developed for elastoplastic behavior of geomaterials, which accounts for tensile damage. The constitutive setting is formulated in the framework of continuum thermodynamics using internal variables. The interaction of elastic damage and plastic flow is examined with the help of very simple constitutive assumptions: (i) a Drucker-Prager yield function is used to ...