Meshless Continuum Modeling of Dry and Wet Granular Media

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Ken Kamrin

Jeudi   9 juillet 2026 à 11 h, salle 259, IUSTI
Jeudi 16 juillet 2026 à 11 h, salle 259, IUSTI

This talk progressively develops continuum-based tools with the aim of realistic but computationally tractable full-scale granular flow simulations.  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.

Ken Kamrin is Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley