Abstract: Great efforts have been made to determine the shear strength of coarse granular materials using both elaborate laboratory tests and empirical methods. However, the elaborate laboratory tests are difficult and time consuming to perform, and the physical meaning of empirical parameters is not obvious in the empirical methods. A simple method to determine the shear strength of coarse granular materials is proposed based on a fractal model for particle breakage. The shear strength of coarse granular materials can be seen as the friction between particle contacts, and the particle contacts can be modeled by the fractal model for particle breakage. Thus the shear strength of coarse granular materials can be easily estimated using the fractal dimension of particle-size distribution. The shear strength of coarse granular materials obtained from the proposed method is in satisfactory agreement with the experimental data of bottom ash from municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI).