Effect of Inherent Fabric on Cyclic Resistance of Granular Materials with Static Shear: A 3D-DEM Study

The Kα parameter is a widely used factor that simplifies the interpretation of the influence of static shear stress on cyclic resistance of granular materials. However, it is still unclear whether the inherent fabric resulting from sample preparation protocols affects the Kα parameter. In this study, we use 3D-DEM to construct samples with polydisperse spherical particles with the same density and initial stress conditions, but different inherent fabrics characterized by coordination number and contact-normal fabric anisotropy. We conduct constant-volume cyclic simple shear tests on these samples and determine their cyclic resistance. Our simulation results indicate that inherent fabric does, quantitatively but not qualitatively, alter the K_α effect. Our results also show that inherent fabric influences the evolution of macro- and micro-parameters, such as mean stress drop, coordination number, fabric anisotropy, and coaxiality of principal directions of fabric and stress for different samples.