Mechanical and Civil Engineering Seminar

*Connection details for this online presentation will be posted when available.

The mechanical response of a porous material to external perturbations such as fluid pressure is at the heart of many natural phenomena as well as engineered materials and processes. Capturing this response is the objective of the field of poromechanics which plays an increasingly more significant role in biosciences (e.g. cell mechanics, cell motility, plant movement, root growth), geosciences (e.g. ice mechanics, carbon sequestration, geothermal energy extraction, oil and gas recovery, earthquake nucleation), material sciences (e.g. lithium-ion battery durability, catalysis) and the interface of these fields such as tissue engineering, drug delivery, dissolution and precipitation in engineered and naturally occurring systems.

Critical to modeling these processes is merging fluid and solid descriptions to resolve the induced solid deformation by accounting for the mechanical work with pressure-volume as (thermodynamic) conjugate coordinates and/or surface tension-area in case of a thin-film formation for e.g. during adsorption or chemical work with chemical potential-particle density as its conjugate coordinates. In this talk, I will present a generalized (anisotropy, non-linearity, multi-phase fluids) discrete theoretical and computational framework to capture the effective poromechanical response of highly heterogeneous porous solids. Emphasizing on the limitations of the continuum micromechanics approach for highly heterogeneous porous solids, I demonstrate the capabilities of this framework by applying it to computed tomography scans of real heterogeneous materials. Then, I will shift focus to particulate-systems. Specifically, I will focus on simulating capillary phenomena in disordered particle packings utilizing a coarse-grained density functional theory. I will describe how this tool can be complemented with experimental techniques to provide previously inaccessible insights into mechanics and physics of wet granular materials. Continuing on the theme of discrete systems, I will discuss designing granular structures using non-convex grains through exploiting particle entanglement with possible applications for space habitation.