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Identifying and following particle-to-particle contacts in real granular media:

An experimental challenge

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DOI: 10.1063/1.4811868

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 Identifying and following particle-to-particle contacts in real granular media:
An experimental challenge
Gioacchino Viggiani, Edward Andò, Clara Jaquet, and Hugues Talbot

Citation: AIP Conf. Proc. 1542, 60 (2013); doi: 10.1063/1.4811868

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 Identifying and following particle-to-particle contacts in real
granular media: an experimental challenge
Gioacchino Viggiani∗ , Edward Andò∗ , Clara Jaquet† and Hugues Talbot∗∗
∗
Grenoble-INP / UJF-Grenoble 1 / CNRS UMR 5521, Laboratoire 3SR, Grenoble, France
† Université Paris Est Créteil, Institut Supérieur de BioSiences, Créteil, France
∗∗ Université Paris-Est, Laboratoire d’Informatique Gaspard-Monge, Equipe A3SI, ESIEE, Noisy-le-Grand, France

Abstract. In the experimental study of the mechanics of granular media, x-ray tomography combined with 3D image analysis
is finally opening the way for studies at the grain scale. Recent work shows that all the grains in a specimen containing several
tens of thousands of grains can be successfully followed throughout deformation, allowing micro-mechanical interpretation
of behaviour observed at the macro-scale. There are practical issues when trying to measure grain-to-grain contacts (i.e.,
identification of contacts and measurement of their orientation) from the same tomography images, however, these are an
essential ingredient for a more profound understanding of the micro-mechanics of deformation.
In this paper, we present a short selection of “mature” grain-scale measurements and then discuss the challenges associated
with grain-to-grain contacts. Results from ongoing work show that very advanced image analysis techniques can allow this
measurement to be made successfully, even when grains surfaces are not imaged at high resolution.
Keywords: experimental micro-mechanics, granular materials, in-situ x-ray tomography, image analysis, inter-particle contacts
PACS: 62.20.F, 07.05.Pj, 81.70.Tx

INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION Figure 2 illustrates the sorts of grain-based measure-

In previous work, x-ray tomography has been used to
record 3D images of small specimens of sand during
loading. Triaxial compression tests on dense specimens
of dry sand are performed inside the x-ray scanner in
Laboratoire 3SR allowing specimens to be scanned at
key points during the test – see Figure 1. A 3D image of
x-ray attenuation in the scanned domain is obtained each
time the specimen is scanned. In order to be able to image
each individual grain, specimen size is considerably less
than standard (22 mm height by 11 mm diameter). A
small specimen benefits from the zoom that the x-ray
cone beam provides, resulting in images that contain
several tens of thousands of grains, with around 5000
voxels per grain at 15μm per pixel for grains with a D50
ments possible over different increments of a test on a
dense specimen Caicos ooids (a rounded carbonate sand
with a D50 of 420 μm). Grains are tracked over all in-
crements; in Figure 2, results are shown for increments
01-02 (beginning of test), 03-04 (before peak), 05-06
(up to the peak) and 16-17 (in the residual stress state).
Slices through the 3D image of the specimen have been
extracted and are oriented in such a way that they con-
tain both the axis of the specimen and the normal to the
Detector
X-ray source
Triaxial cell

of around 400μm. Further details on the experimental

apparatus and procedures can be found in [3]. Specimen

A variety of image analysis techniques have been de- Rotation stage

veloped to identify and measure individual grains in Worm drive for
these 3D images. Very shortly, these require the reliable trolley translation

identification of the inside of each grain by a marker;

markers are then expanded to occupy all the grain vol-
Rails
ume by a watershed algorithm. When these procedures
are applied to several different images from a test, ID-
Track [1] is used to follow grains. This paves the way Trolley Loading system
for measurements of the 3D displacement (by following
each grain’s centre of mass). The measurement of each FIGURE 1. Labelled photograph of the Laboratoire 3SR x-
grain’s 3D rotation presents more of a challenge, which ray scanner, with background faded out for clarity. The blue
has been met by developing a hybrid ID-Track and Digi- edges visible left and right are the door frame of the cabin
tal Image Correlation method [2].

Powders and Grains 2013

AIP Conf. Proc. 1542, 60-65 (2013); doi: 10.1063/1.4811868
© 2013 AIP Publishing LLC 978-0-7354-1166-1/$30.00

60

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 shear band that eventually forms. Grains in Figure 2 are
coloured by their vertical displacement measured over
the increment shown (top), and by the intensity of their
3D rotation as measured by the hybrid technique cited
above (bottom).
0102
Vertical Displacement (mm)
yond just grain kinematics. In particular, a natural evolu-
tion is to include the characterisation of contact kinemat-
ics (i.e., the gain or loss of contacts, and the orientation of
those contacts) during deformation – as suggested by [6]
for 2D experiments, and as is currently done in Discrete
0304 0506 1617
Element simulations.
This paper aims to show some recent work in the direc-

0
tion of achieving the ambitious goal of measuring contact
kinematics on x-ray images like those analysed in Fig-
ure 2. First the detection of contacts between particles
is discussed, and is followed by a discussion of the con-
siderable challenges in making precise measurements of
0.22
contact orientation. The errors associated with classical
6
7
4
5 7
8 particle-separation techniques are studied, and a promis-
Stress Ratio R

6
9
ing new technique allowing this measurement with high
(1 / 3 )

5 3 10
11 12
4
15 16
17 18 precision is detailed, tested on various types of data and
2
3 finally used to make measurements on “real” materials.
2
1
1
Volumetric
Strain (%)

-3

0
GRAIN-TO-GRAIN CONTACTS
0 5 10 15
Normalised Axial Shortening (%)
In the work described above, the material has been im-
30
aged at a resolution sufficient to resolve individual grains
Intensity of Rotation (°)

but not the details of the surface of each grain – this is

visible in Figure 3b, which shows the voxelated surface
of a single Caicos ooid. When characterising the contact
0
between two such objects, the lack of detail at each con-
0102 0304 0506 1617 tact surface (highlighted in the examples shown in Fig-
ures 3a and 3c) causes some measurement problems that
are discussed in this section.
FIGURE 2. Slices showing grains of a triaxial test on Caicos
ooids at 100 kPa confinement coloured by their vertical dis- a) Glass ballotini b) Caicos ooid c) Hostun sand
placement (top) and intensity of 3D rotation (bottom). The in- Contacting grains 2D A single 3D grain Contacting grains 2D
crements studied are highlighted on the stress-ratio and volu-
metric strain vs. axial shortening in the middle of the figure
The first and last increments show fully-developed
mechanisms of deformation: the first increment shows
no grain rotation and a symmetrical and uniform distri-
bution of grain displacements (note: zero displacement
is mechanically imposed at the top of the specimen). The
last increment shows a fully-developed shear band with a
thin band of around six grains with very intense rotations.
The middle increments show a transition mechanism be-
tween uniform deformation and fully localised strain: in Contacting grains 3D Contacting grains 3D

increment 03-04 the displacement field has started to tilt,

FIGURE 3. a) 2D and 3D views of two Glass ballotini in
and some very widely distributed rotations can be seen in contact (these particles are close to spheres); b) 3D view of
the vicinity of the zone where the shear band finally ap- a single Caicos ooid (courtesy of J. Andrade); c) 2D and 3D
pears. In increment 05-06 both fields show signs of con- views of two Hostun sand grains in contact
centration, and the rotations show some chains of grains
rotating together aligned normal to the shear band.
These grain-based measurement tools are extremely
powerful in that they allow grain-scale explanations of Contact identification
macro-scale responses (e.g., [2, 4]). The complex pat-
terns of rotating grains visible in Figure 2 in the incre- When the interconnected solid phase of a 3D image
ments before the peak call for a richer analysis going be- is to be split into individual grains, a separation surface

61

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 between each grain must in some way be defined. This is
typically obtained using a classical watershed algorithm
(see, for example, [12, 16]). If two objects are split by
such a procedure, this is an indication that they can be
said to be in contact to a degree of accuracy which is
a function of the resolution of observation (taking into
account the partial volume effect in the voxels concerned
by the contact). It is thus tempting to consider the voxels
defining a separation surface directly as a volumetric
representation (of unit thickness) of a contact.
Figures 3a and 3c underline how small the contact ar-
eas can be in these images (i.e., how few voxels are used
in the definition of the separation surface). Although
small, contacts can effectively be identified, and their
size measured. As an example, Figure 4 shows the dis-
tribution of contact “areas”, for four different specimens
(each comprised of around fifty thousand grains, and im-
aged under an isotropic stress of 100 kPa). The four dif-
ferent materials imaged are: Hostun sand (very angular),
Ottawa sand (sub-rounded), Caicos ooids (very rounded)
and glass ballotini (almost spherical).
1.00
Hostun sand
Ottawa sand
0.75 Caicos ooids
Relative Frequency
Glass ballotini
0.50
0.25
0.00
0 50 100 150
Contact area (number of voxels)
FIGURE 4. Histogram showing the distribution of contact
sizes in specimens of Hostun sand, Ottawa sand, Caicos ooids
and glass ballotini, calculated with a bin width of 5 voxels
As suggested by the images in Figure 3, and confirmed
in Figure 4, the size of the most frequent “area” of
contact is strongly correlated with roundness: Hostun
sand tends to have small areas – likely to represent point-
to-plane contacts. As grain shapes get more rounded,
this configuration gets increasingly less probable and
faces rather than points are more likely to be in contact;
these appear to be larger contact areas at the resolution
of observation. Furthermore, when the “tail-end” of the
distributions is studied, large contacts are slightly more
probable for Hostun than the other materials, since face-
to-face contacts are possible (but not likely) between
flat faces, yielding large areas. In summary, Figure 4
shows that the areas in contact between grains are better
distributed for more angular materials.
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Contact orientation
Identifying the presence of a contact and measuring
its “area” is not sufficient to fully characterise the way
in which two particles touch; what is missing is the ori-
entation of the contact plane. The most natural approach
to obtain this is simply to fit a plane through the voxels
defining the separation surface coming from the water-
shed procedure.
The computed orientation as an (x, y, z) unit vector can
be projected onto the unit z-positive half-sphere, since we
cannot distinguish between either normals to the plane.
To represent this projection two numbers are sufficient,
equivalent to a longitude and latitude. To render these
projections in print, the Lambert polar equal-area projec-
tion [13] is used.
90°
135° 45°
0° 45° 90°
180° 0°
225° 315°
270°
FIGURE 5. Equal area stereographic projection of contact
orientations for a subvolume of around one thousand Caicos
200 ooids as measured from a standard topological watershed [8]
(projected using a Lambert equal-area projection)
Figure 5 shows the distribution of orientations of
around four thousand contacts calculated for a subvol-
ume of around a thousand Caicos ooids. If orientations
are identically and independently distributed on the unit
half-sphere, this projection yields a point distribution of
uniform density. In the case of Figure 5, however, it is
clear that there is a striking amount of bias in the 45◦ di-
rections. As shown in [2] for this same subvolume, differ-
ent implementations of the watershed procedure give dif-
ferently biassed results. Since there is no a-priori knowl-
edge of the actual distribution of contact orientations in
this granular assembly, it is impossible to assess the ac-
curacy of these measurements.
In the following, this problem is studied more closely
using synthetic data rather than images from x-ray to-
mography. A series of around four thousand binary 3D
spheres (radius 10 pixels) are placed in random orienta-
tions with their centres 20 voxels apart. Spheres are used
because they have the unique property that the vector
62
 90° 90° tershed), has been developed to better define the sepa-
135° 45° 135° 45° ration plane between two binary objects. The technical
details are outside the scope of this paper, and can be
0° 45° 90° 0° 45° 90°
found in [14]. In essence, starting from markers well in-
180° 180°
0° 0°
side the grains, the Power watershed algorithm (as intro-
duced by [9]) assigns for each voxel of the solid phase
225° 315° 225° 315°
the probability of belonging to either marker, which for
270° 270°
the settings used corresponds to the energy of a Ran-
a) Branch Vectors b) Standard Watershed 1 dom Walker. The contact plane is then oriented using the
(Ground Truth) (Topological watershed) voxels representing the “contested plateaus” between the
90° 90°
two markers (i.e., the voxels which are either side of the
135° 45° 135° 45°
0.5 probability isosurface). More precisely, the contact
plane is defined with sub-voxel precision by estimating
the equal-probability isosurface between the two parti-
180°
0° 45° 90°
0° 180°
0° 45° 90°
0° cles in contact. The drastic improvement in the measure-
ment of orientations for the set of simulated spheres is
clearly visible in Figure 6d. These high-quality measure-
225° 315° 225° 315°
ments, however, have a considerable computational cost.
270° 270° In fact, the technique is currently implemented on a per-
c) Standard Watershed 2 d) Proposed Method
(Meyer Algorithm) (Power Watershed)
contact basis (i.e., treating one pair of contacting grains
at a time); the calculation of the Power watershed, which
FIGURE 6. Equal area stereographic projection of contact is the bottleneck in this computation, causes the calcu-
orientations from simulated spheres: a) orientation of branch lation to take a few seconds per contact on a powerful
vectors linking centres of spheres; b) contact orientations ob- desktop machine.
tained with a topological watershed; c) contact orientations ob- Given the very satisfactory performance of the new
tained with Meyer’s algorithm; d) contact orientations obtained
with the Power watershed based technique proposed (after [14])
measurement tool based on Power watershed on syn-
thetic images, its performance was then evaluated on
an x-ray tomography of a real granular assembly made
of glass ballotini, many of which are close to perfect
connecting their centres (“branch vector”) has the same spheres. This allows the same verification as above to
orientation as the normal to the contact surface between be performed. In this case, the branch vector provides a
the spheres, which provides a “ground truth” contact ori- good estimation of the expected contact orientation. In
entation. Figure 6a shows the distribution of orientations order to exclude the “defective” ballotini, 4.7% of those
for this series of spheres obtained from their branch vec- whose surface area to volume ratio is furthest from a
tors, which is uniform overall (note that a small discrete sphere are excluded. Figure 7 shows the distribution of
bias is introduced because spheres are only simulated
with centres located on a voxel, therefore there is only
a finite number of possible orientations). 1.00
Figure 6b shows the orientations of the separation
planes obtained with a standard topological watershed.
0.75
The distribution of the orientations is clearly different
Relative frequency

from the ground truth: the topological watershed intro-

duces extreme artefacts into the measured orientations, 0.50

aligned at 45◦ to the coordinate system, as already no-

ticed on Caicos ooids in Figure 5. Figure 6c shows the
0.25
orientations of the separation planes obtained with an-
other watershed procedure (the Meyer algorithm [15]),
in which the separation plane between the particles is in- 0.00
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
terpixel (i.e., it does not have unit thickness). Although Absolute relative error (degrees)
the measurements are less biassed than with the topolog-
ical watershed, the accuracy remains poor. FIGURE 7. Glass ballotini: frequency distribution of the ab-
Having confirmed that the watershed procedure is re- solute angular deviation between the orientation of the branch
sponsible for introducing the bias in the measured con- vectors and the orientation of the contact as measured by the
tact orientations, a new technique (based on Power wa- Power watershed technique

63

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 the absolute angular deviation between branch vector and
contact orientation, as measured by the Power watershed
technique. The most frequent difference between these
angles is only 4.04◦ . This relatively small error confirms
that Power watershed is a reliable method for the mea-
surement of contact orientations.
Contact kinematics
The measurement of contact orientations with the
topological watershed presented in Figure 5 is repeated
with this new tool in the top left plot of Figure 8. Al-
though, as stated above, there is no a-priori knowledge
of the orientations expected, the fact that there are no ev-
ident artefacts is encouraging. The same measurement is
repeated for the subvolume of grains at the end of the
test (in state 17 – see Figure 2), and is shown in the top
right plot in Figure 8; some indications of a change in the
distribution can be seen in this projection.
90°
135° 45°
180°
0° 45° 90°
0° 180°
225° 315°
270°
from the centre of the circle, and the number of angular
bins in θ at a given bin distance is: 4(2n + 1). The
data shown in the top of Figure 8 is binned using 5
radial bins, giving the segments visible in the bottom
of Figure 8. The number of projected points that falls
inside each bin is recorded, and bin totals are normalised
by the median bin value. The colourmap is centred on
1.0 so that bins in white are those in which the median
number of points has been counted, while red and blue
indicate bins in which more or less than the median
has been counted, respectively. This figure reveals that
there is a small amount of preferential alignment of the
orientations towards the cardinal directions (up, down,
left, right, front, back); this is likely due to extremely
small contact areas where the orientation can only be
poorly defined.
The binned images in Figure 8 clearly indicate the
way in which the distribution of contacts evolves: many
contacts are gained in the x-direction (left and right of
plot) and many are lost in the z-direction (middle of plot)
between configurations COEA01-GL-01 and COEA01-
90°
GL-17. Given that the sub-volume of grains on which
135° 45°
this is calculated becomes part of the shear band that
forms (whose normal is approximately [-1, 0, -1]), this
seems to indicate that grain-to-grain contacts are lost in
0° 45° 90°
0° the direction of principal stress applied to the specimen
(along the axis of compression). Conversely, contacts
are gained in the direction in which the shear band is
225° 315°
advancing.
270°

COEA01-GL-01 COEA01-GL-17
90° 90° CONCLUSION
135° 45° 135° 45°

This paper has shown the type of grain-scale informa-

0° 45° 90° 0° 45° 90°
tion that can be obtained from x-ray tomography images
180° 180°
0° 0°
of real mechanical tests on a representative number of
grains. As seen in previous work (in particular [1, 2]),
225° 315° 225° 315°
high-quality kinematical measurements (although chal-
270° 270°
lenging) are now possible on the vast majority of the
50,000 grains (imaged to have around thirty pixels for a
grain diameter) that make up the specimens tested herein.
0 1 2
The measurements of grain kinematics show complex
patterns of rotating grains in increments up to the peak
FIGURE 8. Equal area stereographic projection of contact
orientations in a subvolume of Caicos ooids. Top: “raw” pro- of the specimen’s global axial stress response; the ulti-
jected orientations for the subvolume at the beginning and at the mate explanation for these patterns must lie in the spatial
end of the test; bottom: same data, but binned (colour represents distribution of inter-granular forces throughout the spec-
the number of projected points per bin divided by the median imen, which is not yet accessible experimentally. How-
number of points in all bins) ever, the characterisation of contacts may shed light on
This change is more visible in the bottom two plots how grains transmit forces.
of Figure 8, where the projected orientations are divided The presence and size of contacting areas has been
into equal-area bins on the plane onto which they have shown to be measurable within certain tolerances,
been projected. Using cylindrical coordinates (r and θ ), whereas the orientation of contacts is much more chal-
the circle in the plane is divided into equally spaced lenging to measure. This is particularly true when grain
bins according to r. Radial bins are labelled n = 0, 1, 2... surfaces are not described at very high resolution, which
is necessarily the case when a significant number of

64

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 grains has been imaged. ASTM STP, Vol. 977, pp. 290–310
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