Shear jamming in packings of frictional disks
The mechanical properties of geotechnical structures depend on the history that generated them. Examples include riverbed hardening and delta formation. Similar history or protocol dependence also occurs on the particle scale. For example, the seminal experiments by D. Bi, et al. in Nature 480 (2011) 355, showed that simple and pure shear can generate jammed packings of thin cylinders whose properties are different from those generated via isotropic compression. In our recent computational studies, we showed that for frictionless disks, shear- and isotropically jammed packings possess the same packing fraction. However, shear-jammed packings possess nonzero stress anisotropy, whereas isotropically jammed packings possess zero anisotropy in the large-system limit. Here, we describe discrete element modeling simulations to prepare jammed packings of frictional disks via isotropic compression and simple shear. We compare the contact number and packing fraction at jamming onset versus the friction coefficient for packings generated via isotropic compression and simple shear. We also address whether the ensemble of jammed packings generated via simple shear and that generated via isotropic compression are the same.