Science, Space and Technology News 2024
MIT researchers developed a method that allows for 3D experiments that can reveal how forces are transmitted through granular materials, and how the shapes of the grains can dramatically change the outcomes. In this photo, 3D photoelastic particles light up and change color under external loads. Credit: Ruben Juanes
Yet, analyzing the way these flow events take place and what determines their outcomes has been a real challenge, and most research has been confined to two-dimensional experiments that don’t reveal the full picture of how these materials behave.have developed a method that allows for detailed 3D experiments that can reveal exactly how forces are transmitted through granular materials, and how the shapes of the grains can dramatically change the outcomes.
Scientific understanding of these materials really began a few decades ago, Juanes explains, with the invention of a way to model their behavior using two-dimensional discs representing how forces are transmitted through a collection of particles. While this provided important new insights, it also faced severe limitations.
Being able to do so is important, he stresses, because “porous media of interest — biological porous media, industrial porous media, and geological porous media — they often contain fluid in their pore spaces, and that fluid will be hydraulically transported through those pore openings. And the two phenomena are coupled: how the stress is transmitted and what the pore fluid pressure is.”
To get that 3D view, they use a combination of the photoelasticity to illuminate the force chains, along with a method called computed tomography, similar to that used in medical CT scans, to reconstruct a full 3D image from a series of 2,400 flat images taken as the object rotates through 360 degrees.
Because there has been no way to observe the 3D force chains in such materials, Juanes says, “Right now it is very difficult to make predictions as to when a landslide will occur precisely, because we don’t know about the architecture of the force chains for different materials.”
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