A Mesoscale-Based Homogenization Study of Sand Using the Discrete Element Method

In geomaterials, macroscale response may reasonably be considered to emerge largely from the mechanical interactions within the grain assembly. This offers a somewhat unique opportunity to be able to characterize the underlying structural evolution of the material, and use that characterization to inform a general constitutive framework to model the behavior of a wide spectrum of soils under a range of pressures and distortional transient loading conditions. The current work explores the internal evolution of a sand using mesoscale simulations of the physics involved. These simulations are used to carry out a homogenization study of the granular subdomain. This is done to 1) identify the threshold at which the transition from discrete mesoscale to the Representative Volume Element (RVE) occurs, and 2) to quantify the uncertainty associated with discretization below that threshold.