The Stress-Force-Fabric relation across shear bands

¹ Department of Physics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27695, USA
² LMGC, Université de Montpellier, CNRS, Montpellier, France
³ Department of Civil, Geological, and Mining Engineering, Polytechnique Montréal, Montréal, Canada
⁴ Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), Paris, France

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Published online: 1 December 2025

Abstract

The strength of granular materials is highly dependent on grain connectivity (fabric), force transmission, and frictional mobilization at the particle scale. Furthermore, these bulk properties are strongly dependent on the geometry and history of loading. It is well established that anisotropy in fabric and force transmission through a granular packing directly relates to the bulk scale strength of the packing via the Stress-Force-Fabric (SFF) relation. We have recently verified the validity of this framework for a broad variety of loading histories and geometries in experimental granular packings, using photoelastic disks to measure individual interparticle contact forces. By tracking both particle positions and interparticle contact force vectors, we mapped the anisotropy of the fabric and forces to the macroscale stress and strain and found excellent agreement between the anisotropic particle-scale measures and the macroscale responses in experiments. Here, we present an analysis of the effect of strong spatial gradients (shear bands) using the SFF framework in a sheared annular geometry, finding that there are strong variations in contact orientation depending on the location within or outside the shear band, even though the principal loading direction is uniform. This highlights that the fabric connectivity significantly changes across the shear band but does not contribute to the direct loading of the material. We disentangle the effects of packing fraction gradients and boundary constraints on the differences in fabric orientation.