ABSTRACT
Over the last decades there have been several studies concerned with the understanding of the mechanisms contributing to soil shear strength. Following the work of Taylor (1948), soil models have been proposed based on the premise that the dilation and the interparticle friction angles combine together to comprise the macroscopic friction angle. Hence the interparticle frictional sliding resistance, quantified in terms of the interparticle friction coefficient µ, has been considered as an essential physical particle property responsible for the macroscopic shear strength. However, there is experimental (Skinner, 1969) as well as computational data (Cambou, 1993) showing that the macroscopic frictional resistance is weakly dependent on the interparticle friction coefficient. More recently, Kruyt & Rothenburg (2004) using numerical simulations found that even in the absence of interparticle friction (µ→0 or µ→∞) the macroscopic behavior is frictional and dissipative.
