Views on Microstructures in Granular Materials

In the present book we focus attention only on specific issues and viewpoints on the continuum description of granular flows, trying at least to present a wide range of scenarios on the matter. Our choices of the material presented here include experimental questions connected with X-ray tomography techniques for analyzing sand, the theoretical analysis of dense inhomogeneous granular shearing, the evaluation of effective stress in unsaturated soils, the modeling of solids with nanopores as a scheme for compacted soils, hyper-plasticity, wave propagation in granular systems, yield criteria, the scheme of partly saturated porous media, some of the computational problems emerging in the analysis of granular matter, multi-scale phenomena in flows of grains with internal structure, and related continuum modeling. All the chapters that constitute the present book offer an overview intended for addressing further research work.