Microstructural formulation of stress dilatancy

In this work, we show that the well-known Rowe's stress-dilatancy relation can be readily recovered from a micromechanical analysis of an assembly of rigid particles as a purely dissipative system in the case of a regular packing. When the analysis is extended to a random packing, one can explicitly incorporate the dependence of fabric, density and stress level on dilatancy, a basic aspect of geomaterial behaviour. The resulting microstructurally based stress dilatancy relation can be easily implemented as a non-associated flow rule in any standard elastoplastic model. Some numerical simulations of stress-dilatancy with initial fabric as a controlling variable are presented to illustrate the developed model.