Abstract
The roles of dilatancy and fabric on the behaviour of granular materials are both numerically and experimentally explored for the study of material instability and failure. This investigation has two basic ingredients : namely a stress dilatancy model with microstructural information embedded through a fabric tensor, and an experimental rendition of force transmission and structure in an assembly of 2-D photoelastic disks. In order to highlight material instability, model simulations of sand behaviour are carried out in axi-symmetric stress conditions along proportional strain paths with varying degrees of controlled dilation (or compaction) including isochoric deformations as a special case. It is shown that sand, otherwise stable under isochoric (undrained) conditions, can actually succumb to an instability or a liquefaction behaviour under other loading paths. This suggests that flow type of failures in soils may not be necessarily restricted to the classic saturated loose sand case in undrained conditions, but could manifest itself under other conditions as well.
