Nature of stress accommodation in sheared granular material: Insights from 3D numerical modeling

Active faults often contain distinct accumulations of granular wear material. During shear, this granular material accommodates stress and strain in a heterogeneous manner that may influence fault stability. We present new work to visualize the nature of contact force distributions during 3D granular shear. Our 3D discrete numerical models consist of granular layers subjected to normal loading and direct shear, where gouge particles are simulated by individual spheres interacting at points of contact according to simple laws. During shear, we observe the transient microscopic processes and resulting macroscopic mechanical behavior that emerge from interactions of thousands of particles. We track particle translations and contact forces to determine the nature of internal stress accommodation with accumulated slip for different initial configurations. We view model outputs using novel 3D visualization techniques. Our results highlight the prevalence of transient directed contact force networks that preferentially transmit enhanced stresses across our granular layers. We demonstrate that particle size distribution (psd) controls the nature of the force networks. Models having a narrow (i.e. relatively uniform) psd exhibit discrete pipe-like force clusters with a dominant and focussed orientation oblique to but in the plane of shear. Wider psd models (e.g. power law size distributions D = 2.6) also show a directed contact force network oblique to shear but enjoy a wider range of orientations and show more out-of-plane linkages perpendicular to shear. Macroscopic friction level, is insensitive to these distinct force network morphologies, however, force network evolution appears to be linked to fluctuations in macroscopic friction. Our results are consistent with predictions, based on recent laboratory observations, that force network morphologies are sensitive to grain characteristics such as particle size distribution of a sheared granular layer. Our numerical approach offers the potential to investigate correlations between contact force geometry, evolution and resulting macroscopic friction, thus allowing us to explore ideas that heterogeneous force distributions in gouge material may exert an important control on fault stability and hence the seismic potential of active faults.