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The Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering present the Midwest Mechanics Seminar Series featuring guest speaker Ken Kamrin, professor of mechanical engineering the University of California, Berkeley, who will present “Meshless Continuum Modeling of Dry and Wet Granular Media.” This event is open to the public and will take place on Wednesday, March 26, from 12:45–1:45 p.m. in room 104 of the Rettaliata Engineering Center (auditorium).

Abstract

Granular media are common in industry, the natural world, and our day-to-day lives, but have been historically resistant to modeling. While grain-by-grain discrete element methods (DEM) exist, these are often far too costly at the length-scales of full-size industrial problems. This talk progressively develops continuum-based tools with the aim of realistic but computationally tractable full-scale flow simulation. We begin with a discussion of dry granular rheology and its essential ingredients. We provide a brief discussion of what sorts of problems can be solved accurately with a basic granular flow model, and discuss a meshless numerical method, the Material Point Method (MPM), which can be used to simulate these models up to huge deformations. Second, we do a deeper dive on how the MPM-based approach can be extended to model submerged granular flow problems using two-phase mixture theory, where the fluid and granular phases are modeled as two separate but coupled continua. This methodology is shown able to replicate experimental results for saturated granular flows over a range of conditions and packing fractions, and can be extended to account for more obscure effects, such as those giving rise to shear-thickening suspensions.

Biography

Ken Kamrin received a B.S. in Engineering Physics with a minor in mathematics at UC Berkeley in 2003, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at MIT in 2008. Kamrin was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences before joining the mechanical engineering faculty at MIT in 2011, where he was appointed the Class of 1956 Career Development Chair and later received a second faculty appointment in applied mathematics. After 13 years as a professor at MIT, Ken joined the UC Berkeley mechanical engineering faculty in 2024. Kamrin’s research focuses on constitutive modeling and computational mechanics for large deformation processes, with interests spanning elastic and plastic solid modeling, granular mechanics, amorphous solid mechanics, and fluid-structure interaction. Kamrin’s honors include the 2010 Nicholas Metropolis Award from APS, the NSF CAREER Award in 2013, the 2015 Eshelby Mechanics Award for Young Faculty, the 2016 ASME Journal of Applied Mechanics Award, and the 2022 MacVicar Faculty Fellowship from MIT. He sat for three years on the Board of Directors of the Society of Engineering Science and serves as an associate editor for the International Journal of Solids and Structures, Granular Matter, and Computational Particle Mechanics. He is co-author of the recent undergraduate textbook Introduction to Mechanics of Solid Materials (Oxford).