Rk Kandasami

Mechanics and Modeling of Cohesive Frictional Granular Materials

In nature, weakly cemented granular materials are encountered in the form of soft rocks such as limestone, sandstone, mudstone, shale, etc. The mechanical behaviour of these materials is quite different from the purely frictional granular materials. The presence of cementation between the grains causes a significant variation in mechanical response under complex boundary conditions. In order to understand the manifestation of this interparticle cohesion at the ensemble level, we have used a hollow cylinder torsional testing apparatus which is capable of independently controlling the magnitude and the direction of the three principal stresses. From this experimental programme, the small strain response, peak strength and post peak behaviour with changing intermediate principle stress ratio (b) and initial mean effective stress (I1) is studied. In addition to the analysis of stress strain behaviour at different b and I1, stress-dilatancy characteristics of these cohesive frictional material are also discussed. This experimental study is followed by calibration and validation of a single hardening constitutive model which considers cementation as additional confinement. Observations from validation exercises suggest that this consideration works well for stress-strain response whereas it fails to predict the volumetric behaviour.

Design of a Portable Compliant Device for Estimating the Failure-Load of Mesoscale Cemented Sand Specimens

In this paper, we present the design and development of a portable, hand-operated composite compliant mechanism for estimating the failure-load of cm-sized stiff objects whose stiffness is of the order of 10 s of kN/m. The motivation for the design comes from the need to estimate the failure-load of mesoscale cemented sand specimens in situ, which is not possible with traditional devices used for large specimens or very small specimens. The composite compliant device, developed in this work, consists of two compliant mechanisms: a force-amplifying compliant mechanism (FaCM) to amplify sufficiently the force exerted by hand in order to break the specimen and a displacement-amplifying compliant mechanism (DaCM) to enable measurement of the force using a proximity sensor. The two mechanisms are designed using the selection-maps technique to amplify the force up to 100N by about a factor of 3 and measure the force with a resolution of 15 mN. The composite device, made using a FaCM, a DaCM, and a Hall effect-based proximity sensor, was tested on mesoscale cemented sand specimens that were 10mm in diameter and 20mm in length. The results are compared with those of a large commercial instrument. Through the experiments, it was observed that the failure-load of the cemented sand specimens varied from 0.95N to 24.33 N, depending on the percentage of cementation and curing period. The estimation of the failure-load using the compliant device was found to be within 1.7% of the measurements obtained using the commercial instrument and thus validating the design. The details of the design, prototyping, specimen preparation, testing, and the results comprise the paper.