The Scientific Challenge
Fascinating phenomena emerge when individual granular particles assemble into a material with a disordered packing structure. While “everything flows”, a granular material can often organize itself into a solid-like form under pressure, e.g., beach sand that supports our weight. Properties of both the solid-like and the liquid-like form of granular matter differ vastly from the better understood crystalline solids and Newtonian liquids. This poses significant challenges for us to better understand nature and to improve industrial processing efficiencies, noting that processing granular materials, such as grains, powders, ores, and sand, roughly consumes 10% of the total energy produced in our planet.
Our research group aims to reveal the physics and mechanics behind such disordered media with a focus on how they deform using a combination of experiments, discrete particle simulations, as well as machine-learning informed modeling. We are interested not only in how to better characterize and design granular materials, but also in how to better interact with these soft and yielding media in manufacturing as well as in robotic locomotion.