Mechanics of Anisotropic Granular Materials

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The mechanics of granular materials has diverse applications ranging from the efficient transportation and sorting of grains to the modeling of landslides and avalanches. Better understanding, e.g. through accurate models, is necessary for future improvements of these processes and the control of landslides and avalanches. Grains show a very complex mechanical response that can transition from a static-state into a dynamic flow.***All naturally occurring grains, including sand, rocks or pebbles, consist of non-spherical (shaped) grains. Also in industry, most grains are non-spherical, in particular in agriculture and food processing where crops have elongated or flattened shapes, or in pharmaceutics with pills and drug capsules.***The microstructure and ability of shaped grains to align themselves provides an added degree of complexity. The mechanical properties of shaped grains vary significantly with the microstructure alignment of the grains which gives rise to direction dependent mechanical properties (anisotropy).***This research program will develop mathematical models for shaped grains to advance our fundamental understanding of the mechanics of shaped grains which is currently not well understood by the Engineering and Physics communities. The developed models will be compared with a range of experiments conducted at the DynamiX: X-ray tomography and the Particles and Grains Laboratories at the University of Sydney, Australia.***Very little work is published in the literature studying the mechanics of shaped grains and, to our knowledge, no mathematical model has been developed as of yet. Hence, the proposed research program will explore research directions which are novel, not well understood and very little studied.***The main novel idea in this research program is to explicitly account for the microstructure reflecting the grain alignment in the mathematical models using anisotropic constitutive laws to accurately describe the mechanical properties. The main two challenges are to understand the mechanism of shaped grains alignment and the relationship between the mechanical properties and the microstructure arrangement.***The mechanics of shaped grains has many applications in transportation, sorting and storing of granular materials in agriculture (crops), food processing and the pharmaceutics (pills and drug capsules) industries. The results of this research program will be made available to these industries to improve their process as well as industries designing and manufacturing supporting machinery. It is anticipated that the insights and the developed mathematical models will have substantial impact both scientifically and on the many industries processing grain. It is also anticipated that this research program will have contribution to research on other systems involving the mechanics of non-spherical particles such as modeling red blood cells flow.