D. Cantor, E. Azéma, C. Ovalle, Failure of an effective stress approach in polydisperse wet granular materials, Phys. Rev. Research, 6, L022008 (2024)

In this Letter, the effective stress principle (ESP)—originally developed for granular materials saturated with water and recently extended to unsaturated ones via simulations—is shown to fail once the material presents wide grain size distributions. We demonstrate that the current ESP approaches cannot capture the Mohr-Coulomb strength parameters as soon as the grain size span exceeds dmax/dmin∼4. This failure is attributed to significant differences in the fabric generated by solid interactions in the wet material, which are supposedly capable of matching the characteristics of the dry material. We show that a generalization of the ESP requires not only macroscopic considerations but also direct attention to the nature of contact and force networks.