How to define a container & void ratio

Submitted by venes520 on Wed, 02/15/2012 - 08:03

Hi guys,

I am trying to simulate a Direct Shear Box Test for soil.

I want to create two containers (two granular boxes, upper & lower) to contain the soil assemble and do the shearing.

To create the containers, I am thinking of wall/gran, however, I don't know how to group this walls together so that they become a container and move together, be able to read the force on it.

Please help me out if you have any thoughts or did something similar.

Also, anyone knows how to define e (void ratio) of soil assembles? the overlapping of particles makes it difficult to calculate.

The attachment is a demonstration of Direct Shear Box Test
Thanks very much

Anson Liang
lzefeng@gmail.com

AttachmentSize
Image icon Direct Shear Test.jpg13.98 KB

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ckloss's picture

ckloss | Fri, 02/17/2012 - 10:55

Hi Anson,

you could make up the wall/gran of two meshes (which stand for the two containers), and move one or two of the containers with fix move/mesh/gran. If you use fix mesh/gran/stressanalysis, you can extract the force on the mesh

Cheers, Christoph

venes520 | Fri, 02/17/2012 - 12:38

Thanks Chrsitoph,
This is a good idea, I will have a try.
Just a follow-up questions: can I add force to a container or one of the walls of the container?

Cheers
Anson Liang

venes520 | Fri, 02/17/2012 - 18:26

Christoph, can you also suggest some ways to create walls in CAD, I am a start, any documents for that?

Thanks

Cheers
Anson Liang

moritzhoefert | Mon, 02/20/2012 - 16:45

You could play around with FreeCAD which is freeware. It allows for modeling a geometry and meshing its surfaces and export the mesh in stl format. If you have access to Ansys software I recommend using gambit: Create the relevant surfaces and mehs them with a tet-mesh. Export an msh file and convert it with tgrid to stl.