Abstract

The mechanics of granular materials has received much attention across a wide range of engineering and science disciplines over the past fifty years or so, from the seminal work of O. Reynolds (late 1800’s) to P.W. Rowe (1960’s), to more recent multiscale investigations involving integrated experimental and computational methods. The seminar will present research efforts in our group to develop a concurrent multiscale computational modeling framework for simulating the mechanical response of granular materials, with extensions to mixed cohesionless-cohesive soil approaches, touching upon some aspects of our experimental collaborations. Certain features of the multiscale modeling approach are discussed within the context of generalized continuum mechanics, in this case a nonlinear micromorphic continuum mechanics theory and how stresses (and later, strains) are estimated from the underlying mesoscale (i.e., grain length scale) computational model. The concurrent multiscale computational modeling framework is then placed into context within an Office of Naval Research (ONR) Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) project on soil blast modeling and simulation, highlighting the integrated experimental-computational efforts.