CAREER: Decoding The Full Spectrum of Soil Behavior Inertial Transitions

About This Grant

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports research that intends to address a critical gap in understanding, modeling, and predicting how soil behaves during transitions from solid-like to fluid-like motion, such as during landslides. The knowledge generated by this project can contribute to enhancing early warning systems and engineering solutions to address natural disasters, as well as industrial applications such as hydraulic fracturing, powder processing optimization, and the installation of offshore foundations. This award will use immersive virtual reality experiences at the annual Maine Engineering Week Expo and the University of Maine’s Hudson Museum to communicate project results to K-12 students and the public, increasing their understanding of soil motion and landslide hazards. The unique dataset and transformative numerical models generated during this award will be made publicly available on Anura3D Github and DesignSafe. The PI will also develop and teach a new graduate seminar on advanced numerical simulation based on the award’s research methods and results. This CAREER award will seek to extend critical state theory and provide a novel theoretical framework for understanding soil motion transitions, contributing to the formulation of a general theory of motion for granular materials and resolving incongruities generated by attempts to combine large-deformation modeling techniques with constitutive models developed for small strain deformations only. This project’s research objectives include: 1) measuring the statistical characteristics of particle collisions using discrete element modeling, 2) conducting rheology tests in dry and saturated sands to characterize sand’s rheological properties at the elemental level, and 3) measuring the effect of inertial behavior transitions on the final runout of physical column collapse models in hypergravity in dry and saturated conditions. Novel, systematic mapping of soil micromechanics to the elemental constitutive level and to system-level analysis will transform micromechanical particle collision statistics and Brownian motion into stress tensors that will constitute the basis for extending critical state theory. These experiments will be transformative because they will independently map critical states beyond quasistatic regimes. This award will enable the PI to establish a long-term career in the field analysis and modeling of large, rapid deformation of granular materials. 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.