On mechanical behaviour of inherently anisotropic sand formations

The work presented here focuses on the mechanical behavior of inherently anisotropic granular materials. Both the experimental and numerical investigations are carried out using crushed limestone sand with elongated angular-shaped aggregates. The experimental study involves material tests and small-scale model tests. The material tests entail a series of direct shear, triaxial and hollow cylinder experiments, while the structural tests are aimed at examining the dependency of bearing capacity of a rigid footing on the angle of deposition of the material. The numerical part of this work is associated with implementation of a constitutive framework that accounts for the effects of inherent anisotropy of the material as well as the strain localization. The performance of the proposed constitutive framework is illustrated by numerical examples which involve simulation of both material and structural tests and the results are compared with the experimental data.