Failure of granular materials at different scales - microscale approach

In recent years there has been an increase of interest in packed granular and discontinuous media. Due to the properties of such materials, a simple continuum approach is not appropriate to describe the material behavior. Breaking and forming of new contacts between grains, distinguishing for granular media, cannot be captured. We apply a computational homogenization method [6] which is based on a two scale concept to complete the task of modeling packed granular materials. (© 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)