Travel Support for International Focus Workshop: Granular and Particulate Networks

North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC

Investigators

Abstract

This award will provide partial support for US researchers to attend an interdisciplinary workshop titled "Granular and Particulate Networks (PARNET19)," which will be held in Dresden, Germany on July 8-10, 2019. The workshop will be hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems. The award will support young researchers who will benefit from interacting with international leaders in the field of granular and particulate media. It will also provide them opportunities to establish new collaborations with international colleagues and present results of their research to an international science and engineering audience. Special efforts will be made to support researchers from traditionally underrepresented groups in science and engineering. The analysis of particulate and granular materials poses challenging problems. The arrangements of the particles and the distribution of forces in particulate and granular media span a broad range of length scales, which makes it especially difficult to predict how these materials respond to external loadings. Developing new theoretical methods that can take particle-level interactions and predict macroscopic properties requires expertise from mathematics, statistics, physics, engineering and computer science. The goal of the workshop is to assemble researchers from a wide variety of science and engineering disciplines, including experts trained in network-based approaches, to explore the use of network theory to guide new theoretical developments for particulate and granular media. Participants will explore ways to isolate key characteristics of force transmission in particulate networks, identify appropriate tools from network analysis to describe granular dynamics, and use these tools to predict failures in granular systems 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.