Large-Scale Simulations of Foamed Glass Aggregate for Geotechnical Design Parameters

P Aminpour and KJ Sjoblom and S Yeom and RH Swan and A Filshill and TD Stark, IFCEE 2018: ADVANCES IN GEOMATERIAL MODELING AND SITE CHARACTERIZATION, 206-217 (2018).

Lightweight fill materials, including foamed glass aggregates are increasingly being used in civil engineering and infrastructure applications in the U.S. The energy saving assessments have proven that the use of foamed recycled glass as engineering material has much lower energy consumption relative to a conventional aggregate-cement material. However, due to the large size and brittle nature of the aggregates, costly large-scale engineering tests are required to evaluate the properties of the material. Therefore, a unique simulation was developed within an open source molecular dynamics environment to model the behavior of these materials. The simulations incorporated a granular contact model coupled with a unique bonding mechanism to reproduce the brittle response of the material. Several geotechnical design characteristics such as stress-strain behavior and lateral earth pressure coefficient were obtained.

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