Elastic behavior of weakly cemented contact

International audienceWe investigate the elastic behavior of weakly cemented contact. We show that the radial distribution of stresses and the stiffnesses of a cemented contact are governed by the ratio a/R, where R, a and are respectively the grain radius, the contact size, and the ratio of the elastic moduli of cement and grains. Moreover, we show that a cemented contact is always less stiff than a Hertzian contact having a similar size. Finally, we propose accurate approximate expressions of the contact stiffnesses