# Evolution of fragment size distributions from the crushing of granular materials

## TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations to analyze how fragment size distributions evolve during crushing of granular materials, revealing different distributions for single particles and packed beds, and exploring force networks and coordination numbers.

## Contribution

It demonstrates the transition from log-normal to power-law distributions in fragment sizes and links these patterns to force networks and particle coordination.

## Key findings

- Single particle crushing yields log-normal distributions.
- Packed bed crushing results in power-law distributions.
- Distribution converges to steady state in many grains system.

## Abstract

We study the fragment size distributions after crushing of single and many particles under uniaxial compression inside a cylindrical container by means of numerical simulations. Under the assumption that breaking goes through the bulk of the particle we obtain the size distributions of fragments for both cases after large displacements. For the single particle crushing, this fragmentation mechanism produces a log-normal size distribution, which deviates from the power-law distribution of fragment sizes for the packed bed. We show that as the breaking process evolves, a power-law dependency on the displacement is present for the single grain, while for the many grains system, the distribution converges to a steady state. We further investigate the force networks and the average coordination number as a function of the particle size, which gives inside about the origin of the power-law distributions for the granular assembly under uniaxial compression.