The National Science Foundation has made an Engineering Research Initiation award of $200,000 over two years, for an Adaptive Multi-Fidelity Framework for Modeling Heterogeneous Materials Under Extreme Conditions.
Resolving deformation and fracture inside every grain of a granular assembly is expensive, and many regions may not require particle-scale resolution at every stage of loading. The project is about deciding where the expensive description is needed and where a cheaper one will do, while estimating the error introduced by the coarser description. Progress is on the granular mechanics project page.
The group is recruiting undergraduate and graduate researchers interested in computational mechanics, and in applying numerical and machine-learning methods to fracture, functional soft materials and granular media. Write to prashant.jha@sdsmt.edu.