• Diambra, Andrea
• Ibraim, Erdin
• Luo, Sha

Abstract

Soil grain crushing has a significant influence on the performance of the geotechnical systems. However, the mechanics<br/>of particle breakage remains one of the most difficult problems in geomechanics. For a bulk of soil grains under loading, one of the<br/>ongoing challenges is the prediction of the extent of soil particle crushing and its evolution. While the main goal of a wider research is<br/>to investigate the possibility of using Acoustic Emission (AE) technique to characterise the extent and evolution of soil grain<br/>crushing, this paper particularly focuses on individual grains under uniaxial compression loading. Insight into the use of AE to<br/>characterize the crushing mechanism and signature is gained through testing of individual particles of chalk. For one particle, it<br/>appears that the frequency content of the AE recorded signals does not seem to be affected by a particular crushing mechanism,<br/>limited fragmentation or critical failure. However, the discrimination between these two mechanisms is given through inspection of<br/>the corresponding waveforms and evaluation of parameters like maximum amplitude and energy. Similar size particles also appear to<br/>provide good repeatability with similar frequency contents for both crushing mechanisms.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• grain
• acoustic emission