Stress and fabric for polydisperse, frictionless, dense 2D granular media

Abstract

For fabric and stress tensor, correlations of microscopic quantities are studied and the influence of the particle size probability distribution function is isolated from that of other quantities. Based on the observations that the covered surface area and the average force per contact are (almost) size-independent, we show that fabric and stress can be factorized into products of some averaged quantities (like coordination number, particle radius, or contact force), and dimensionless correction factors, which depend only on moments of the particle size distribution function. Numerical simulations are in proper agreement with the theoretical predictions for moderately wide size distributions. Show more