ABSTRACT
The key physical quantity governing material behavior is the solids volume fraction α, 0 ≤α≤ 1. Let a macroscopic mass B of granular material occupying a spatial region P of three-dimensional Euclidean space at time t and consider a comparison of two models, one discrete the other continuous. The relationship between the discrete and the continuum, between the microscopic and the macroscopic, is now being analysed in the literature, Luding (2001), takes a discrete model and averages to obtain continuum quantities. In this paper we go in the opposite direction, we start with a continuum model and look for intuitive interpretations of some of the quantities appearing in the model as averaged quantities of a discrete model. A complementary approach is presented in Jiang et al (2005).
