An elastoplastic model for granular materials taking into account grain breakage

Granular materials are constituted of an assembly of particles. In spite of the simplicity of this assembly, its mechanical behaviour is complex. In the first stage we propose a framework to establish correlations between parameters of the supposedly continuous medium and grain properties which are assumed to be constant. However, this hypothesis is no longer valid in the case where physical (shape, size…) or mechanical properties (Young modulus Eg, Poissonʹs ratio νg…) of grains evolve during loading, causing the behaviour of the assembly to modify. We study the influence of the physical and mechanical parameters on grain breakage. We subsequently propose a way to model the influence of the grain breakage on granular materials and we introduce this influence in an elastoplastic constitutive model. Validations are made on two kinds of sands under isotropic and triaxial loading. Since the results of numerical computations corresponded well with the experimental data, we believe that the new model is capable of accurately simulating the behaviour of granular materials under a wide range of stresses and of taking into account, through new parameters, the individual strength of grains.