Towards a theory of granular plasticity

A theory of granular plasticity based on the time-averaged rigid-plastic flow equations is presented. Slow granular flows in hoppers are often modeled as rigid-plastic flows with frictional yield conditions. However, such constitutive relations lead to systems of partial differential equations that are ill-posed: they possess instabilities in the short-wavelength limit. In addition, features of these flows clearly depend on microstructure in a way not modeled by such continuum models. Here an attempt is made to address both short-comings by splitting variables into ‘fluctuating’ plus ‘average’ parts and time-averaging the rigid-plastic flow equations to produce effective equations which depend on the ‘average’ variables and variances of the ‘fluctuating’ variables. Microstructural physics can be introduced by appealing to the kinetic theory of inelastic hard-spheres to develop a constitutive relation for the new ‘fluctuating’ variables. The equations can then be closed by a suitable consitutive equation, requiring that this system of equations be stable in the short-wavelength limit. In this way a granular length-scale is introduced to the rigid-plastic flow equations.