This book presents a complete and comprehensive analysis of the behaviour of granular materials including the description of experimental results, the different ways to define the global behaviour from local phenomena at the particle scale, the various modellings which can be used for a D.E.M. analysis to solve practical problems and finally the analysis of strain localisation. The concepts developed in this book are applicable to many kinds of granular materials considered in civil, mechanical or chemical engineering.

Granular Materials at Meso-scale: Towards a Change of Scale Approach proposes a new way for developing an efficient change of scale-considering a meso-scale defined at the level of local arrays of particles. The change of scale is known to be a very interesting way to improve the modelling of mechanical behavior granular materials. In the past, studies have been proposed using a micro-scale at the grain level to perform change of scale, but limitations have been proven for these approaches. Definition and analysis of the phases are detailed, constituted by sets of meso-domains sharing the same texture characteristics. The authors propose a local constitutive model for the phases, allowing the constitutive model of the representative elementary volume to be definied from a change-of-scale approach and, finally, presenting the validation of obtained modeling on cyclic loadings.