Experimental and Numerical Studies of Shear Layers in Granular Shear Cell

Abstract

The stability of a shear layer inside a granular material in a gravity field is studied experimentally and numerically. A shear cell is built of transparent acrylic to visualize the motion of the granular material. This shear cell consists of two concentric cylinders containing layers of uniform spheres in the annular space between the cylinders. The shearing motion of the spheres is produced by rotating the bottom boundary of the cell. Friction of the cylinder walls resists the shear motion, thus creating a single shear layer adjacent to the bottom boundary, while the rest of the layers above move with constant speed as a solid body. As the rotation speed of the bottom boundary increases, two layers adjacent to the bottom boundary begin to shear. This shearing zone quickly thickens and dilates as the rotational speed increases. The transition of this shear motion from a single layer to many layers of shearing is studied by video recording. The initiation of this transition is observed to depend on the material properties and the number of layers overlaying the shear layer. A one-dimensional numerical model is constructed to bring insight into this transitional phenomenon.