Mechanical characteristics for interfaces between granular materials

The mechanical behavior and constitutive modeling of interfaces between two granular materials is one of the significant concerns in design of soil structures such as earth-rock-fill dams. The simple shear tests were conducted to investigate the strength and deformation characteristics for interfaces between core material and filter material in earth core rock-fill dam. Based on the test results, the perfect-plastic model was proposed to describe the interface behavior. The model was incorporated in the finite element software to study the interface behavior, and the non-linear failure process of interfaces was captured by the proposed model.