Capillary Cohesion between Two Spherical Glass Particles

For developing a unique model in which the rheological performance of fresh concretes from zero-slump to self compacting concrete can be described, it is necessary to define workability in terms of fundamental physical entities. In order to achieve this, the concept of capillary cohesion from science of granular physics has been considered as the first step for investigation. In this paper, focus is on this concept and providing some preliminary achievements of the experimental work. In wet granular material the presence of liquid generates cohesion between particles and affects the mechanical properties of the granular media to a large extent. For the simulation of the behavior of this material by considering pendular state for liquid content, a discrete element method (DEM) is used. The cohesion between a grain-pair is expressed as an explicit function of local geometrical and physical parameters. In this study emphasis is on static and/or quasi-static situations. Since the cohesion dominates over other effects of the liquid, such as viscosity and lubrication, the effect of the size of particles on the cohesion arising from the liquid bridge is investigated explicitly. Based on experimental results, a closed-formula approximation is developed that can be used to calculate the capillary force acting between two glass spheres as a function of the separation distance for a given bridge volume.