Previous researches have revealed that the lunar surface soil (regolith) has a very wide range of grain size distribution (e.g. Heiken et al. 1991). The mechanical properties of such a granular material may be quite different from those of poorly-graded granular materials. This paper proposes a method to reproduce the mechanical properties of a well-graded granular material by replacing it with a binary mixture of different particle sizes and evaluates systematically the effects of grain size distribution. A series of maximum and minimum density tests and direct shear tests with a lunar soil simulant, FJS-1, proved that the model effectively simulates the void ratio range and the shear strength of original material.
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