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A benchmark strategy for the experimental measurement of contact fabric

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Abstract

The mechanics of granular materials can be better understood by experimental measurement of fabric and its evolution under load. X-ray tomography is a tool that is increasingly used to acquire three-dimensional images and thus, enables such measurements. Our previous study on the metrology of interparticle contacts revealed that the most common approaches either fail to accurately measure contact fabric or introduce a strong bias. Methods to improve these measurements (i.e., the detection and orientation of contacts) were proposed and validated. This work develops a strategy to benchmark image analysis tools that can be used for the determination of contact fabric from tomographic images. The discrete element method is used to create and load a reference specimen for which the fabric and its evolution is precisely known. Chosen states of this synthetic specimen are turned into realistic images taking into account inherent image properties, such as the partial volume effect, blur and noise. The application of the image analysis tools on these images validates the findings of the metrological study and highlights the importance of addressing the identified shortcomings, i.e., the systematical over-detection of contacts and the strong bias of orientations when using common watersheds.

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Notes

  1. In this case realistic images are images that have similar properties as X-ray tomographies.

  2. Note: Due to the angular and non-convex shape of the Hostun sand grains, the description of the orientation however is not objective, as highlighted in [21]: when observing the same grains in different spatial resolutions, contacts might artificially be created (due to the PVE) or multiple contact points at which two grains are touching might be merged to appear as a single contact.

  3. This value corresponds to 0.7 for 32 bit floating point images, which was found to yield acceptable results in [21].

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Acknowledgements

We express our thanks to Félix Bertoni for implementing Kalisphera in C++. Laboratoire 3SR is part of the LabEx Tec 21 (Investissements d’Avenir—Grant Agreement No. ANR-11-LABX-0030). We thank the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) at TU Dresden for generous allocations of computing resources.

Funding

The research leading to these results has received funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) No. 254872581 and from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program FP7-ERC-IDEAS Advanced Grant Agreement No. 290963 (SOMEF).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Max Wiebicke & Ivo Herle

  2. CNRS, Grenoble INP, 3SR, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, 38000, Grenoble, France

    Edward Andò & Gioacchino Viggiani

  3. woodem.eu, Prague, Czech Republic

    Václav Šmilauer

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  1. Max Wiebicke
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Correspondence to Max Wiebicke.

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Wiebicke, M., Andò, E., Šmilauer, V. et al. A benchmark strategy for the experimental measurement of contact fabric. Granular Matter 21, 54 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10035-019-0902-x

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