Abstract
Mechanical behaviors of granular materials, which are developed from the interaction of grains, are very complicated to understand. In such a field, the computational mechanics is a powerful tool to investigate various features by the simulation in the grain level. To model the behavior of granular materials, geometrical structures should be represented precisely since stability of the material is secured by contact between grains. In this paper, we present an image-based modeling based on the distinct element method for granular materials. The 3-D image data of a gravel specimen obtained by CT scan are utilized to represent a real geometrical structure and individual grains are separated in the geometrical model by an image processing technique. The distinct element method that deals with grains with irregular shape obtained by the image data is also presented.
