CAREER: Soil Penetration through Bioinspired Stress State Manipulation

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant will advance understanding and evaluate the application of several adaptive and energy-efficient soil penetration processes to inspire a new paradigm for design and construction of civil infrastructure. Current and future environmental and economic challenges, including the continued growing population and the depletion of natural resources, create a strong demand for sustainable and adaptive infrastructure. Many aspects of our infrastructure rely on soil penetration processes, from the characterization of soils at project sites to construction. This project will improve our understanding of the soil burrowing and penetration strategies used by several insects, mollusks, and fishes to develop innovative solutions for applications in foundation and anchorage systems, tunneling, soil characterization, and monitoring of sites and structures. The integrated educational, diversity, and outreach goals are to raise awareness and broaden the overall understanding of bioinspiration as a philosophy for development of sustainable engineering solutions and to help develop a workforce that is inclusive of Hispanic and Latinx students for the field of bioinspired geotechnics.The principal research goals of this project are to identify and quantify the mechanisms that enable efficient soil penetration in biological systems and to effectively upscale these mechanisms to physical scales relevant to civil infrastructure. Biological adaptations involved in wasp, honeybee, mosquito, and sand lance substrate penetration, earth and marine worm locomotion, caecilian and clam burrowing, and root growth will be explored. This project will integrate bioinspired design, laboratory experiments, discrete element modeling simulations, and centrifuge models. The fundamental mechanical processes that facilitate bioinspired soil penetration will be investigated, including soil arching, principal stress rotation, interactions between zones with altered stress states, load transfer and its dependency on shape, and softening caused by pore fluid pressurization. The education and outreach efforts will be targeted towards middle school and high school students through youth citizen science activities and towards undergraduate and graduate students through training in the classroom and the laboratory. This educational and outreach plan will aim to increase participation of Hispanic and Latinx students in the bioinspired geotechnics field.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.