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Paper

TESTING March 09, 2026

Structural aging of a cohesive and amorphous granular solid under cyclic loading

Authors

William Hobson-Rhoades, Douglas J Durian, Yue Fan, Hongyi Xiao

Abstract

We investigate how cyclic loading evolves the structure and deformation behaviors of a granular raft composed of particles floating at an air-oil interface. The raft has a disordered particle packing structure, and is cohesive due to capillary interactions between particles. Under uniaxial cyclic loading with a small strain amplitude, the raft's packing structure experiences an aging process characterized by logarithmically increasing packing fraction and decreasing structural heterogeneity. The observed structural change is due to particle dynamics that are organized around morphologically evolving voids in the raft. The raft is then subjected to quasi-static tension or compression tests until failure. In comparison with non-aged rafts, the rafts that experienced cyclic loading show a higher strength, higher stiffness, and lower ductility, along with qualitatively different features, such as a stress overshoot in the loading curve.

Metadata

arXiv ID: 2603.07852
Provider: ARXIV
Primary Category: cond-mat.soft
Published: 2026-03-09
Fetched: 2026-03-10 05:43

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