Loss of Load-Bearing Capacity in Sand Base of Heavy Column and in Plate Buried in Granular Medium under Multiple Weak Impacts

The article describes the stability testing and calculation results for a heavy column set on the surface of a granular medium, and for a plate buried in the granular medium. The column and plate were exposed to a pre-limiting static load. The granular medium was subjected to multiple weak impacts. The lab-scale tests determined that under such loading, the granular medium evolved gradually to the critical condition and lost the shearing strength. The rate of approaching the critical condition grows with the number of impacts. The critical number of impacts before failure of the medium obeys the log-normal distribution. The most probable value of the critical impact number increases exponentially with the decrease in the static load. The DEM-based modeling of the stability loss in the plate buried in the granular medium yielded the results that qualitatively coincided with the test data.