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Stresses Within Granular Materials Contained Between Vertical Walls

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Abstract

Arching is an important phenomenon that has to be understood when designing backfilled trenches, storage silos and underground mine stopes supporting granular materials. Here, a significant fraction of the fill load is carried by the wall friction and hence the load transferred to the bottom of the fill is substantially reduced. The objective of this paper is to present three different approaches, namely, analytical, experimental and numerical, to study the vertical normal stresses within a granular material contained between vertical walls. The laboratory model discussed herein is an effective tool in deriving the variation of shear stress on the wall and the average normal stresses with depth. It is shown that the analytical and numerical models that treat the granular material as a continuum suggest an asymptotic vertical normal stress that is reached at certain depths, whereas the laboratory model tests show that the vertical stresses increase continuously even at very large depths.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the valuable contributions made by our technical officers and the postgraduates who have helped us to understand the minefills and the arching phenomenon better. Mr. Warren O’Donnell’s ingenuity and his technical skills in the design and fabrication of the laboratory model stope were vital to this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, James Cook University, Townsville, 4811, Australia

    Nagaratnam Sivakugan & Sankha Widisinghe

Authors
  1. Nagaratnam Sivakugan
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  2. Sankha Widisinghe
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Correspondence to Nagaratnam Sivakugan.

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Sivakugan, N., Widisinghe, S. Stresses Within Granular Materials Contained Between Vertical Walls. Indian Geotech J 43, 30–38 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40098-012-0029-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40098-012-0029-z

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