Constitutive relations for the shear band evolution in granular matter under large strain

A so-called “split-bottom ring shear cell” leads to wide shear bands under slow, quasi-static deformation. Unlike normal cylindrical Couette shear cells or rheometers, the bottom plate is split such that the outer part of it can move with the outer wall, while the other part (inner disk) is immobile. From discrete element simulations (DEM), several continuum fields like the density, velocity, deformation gradient and stress are computed and evaluated with the goal to formulate objective constitutive relations for the powder flow behavior. From a single simulation, by applying time- and (local) space-averaging, a non-linear yield surface is obtained with peculiar stress dependence. The anisotropy is always smaller than the macroscopic friction coefficient. However, the lower bound of anisotropy increases with the strain rate, approaching the maximum according to a stretched exponential with a specific rate that is consistent with a shear path of about one particle diameter.