Eur. Phys. J. E (2005) 17: 93-100
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/i2005-10002-2

Original Article

From the stress response function (back) to the sand pile “dip”

¹ Laboratoire de Physique et Mécanique des Milieux Hétérogènes, ESPCI, 10 rue Vauquelin, 75231, Paris Cedex 05, France
² Department of Physics & Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems, Duke University, 27708-0305, Durham, NC, USA

^* e-mail: claudin@ccr.jussieu.fr

Received: 6 January 2005
Accepted: 8 March 2005
Published online: 6 April 2005

Abstract

We relate the pressure “dip” observed at the bottom of a sand pile prepared by successive avalanches to the stress profile obtained on sheared granular layers in response to a localized vertical overload. We show that, within a simple anisotropic elastic analysis, the skewness and the tilt of the response profile caused by shearing provide a qualitative agreement with the sand pile dip effect. We conclude that the texture anisotropy produced by the avalanches is in essence similar to that induced by a simple shearing --albeit tilted by the angle of repose of the pile. This work also shows that this response function technique could be very well adapted to probe the texture of static granular packing.