Steve WaiChing Sun, partner highbrow of polite engineering and engineering mechanics, has won a three-year, $360,000 2017 Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) grant, awarded by a Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). He is one of 58 researchers from 41 investigate institutions to be respected with this early career award. His winning project—“Modeling a High-rate Responses of Wetted Granular Materials Across Scales and a Third-party Replicable Validation Exercises Utilizing 3D Printers”—was comparison from some-more than 230 proposals to AFOSR’s YIP program, that fosters artistic simple investigate in scholarship and engineering and a growth of superb immature principal investigators graduated within 5 years of receiving their PhDs.
Sun works in a fields of fanciful and computational plain mechanics, poromechanics, and multiscale displaying of entirely joined multi-physical systems, looking to urge predictions of large-scale margin problems with discernment from small-scale observations and simulations. His investigate is focused on advancing a bargain on multiphase materials underneath impassioned conditions and expanding predictive capabilities for associated engineering applications, including geological CO sequestration, hydraulic fracture, and chief rubbish disposal.
Simulation of detonate and fragmentation of geological materials due to high impact loading.
Sun will use a YIP endowment to lead a total experiential-modeling bid to assistance know a high-strain-rate responses of wetted granular materials to impact loadings expelled into a soil, such as blasts, explosion, munitions, subsurface exploration, belligerent improvement, and ballistic disadvantage of troops structures. One pivotal member of his YIP plan is a introduction of 3D copy to emanate initial prototypes that can be replicated and certified by other researchers.
Sun’s plan has dual goals: First, he will deliver new numerical models that make some-more accurate and fit predictions on how granular materials respond to high-rate loading regulating multiscale displaying techniques. This enrichment requires improved detonate and fragmentation models that are specific to a granular materials, as good as theories and techniques that couple nanoscale simulations to field-scale engineering problems with consistency.
Secondly, he skeleton to rise a systemic and unprejudiced approach to concede other researchers to plea his formula and commentary by reproducing his work regulating 3D printers and open-source codes grown by his team. Sun’s 3D copy techniques will capacitate other researchers to imitate a same fake particles of a same sold size, shape, and component properties used in his research. By creation adequate information available, he hopes to concede other researchers to perform a same simulations, experiments, and validation exercises as he did. “They can even plea a formula easily,” he observes. “A vicious emanate we wish to residence is progressing replication, corroboration, and clarity of investigate results, and we wish that other researchers will strech out to us and indicate out a shortcomings so that we all can learn from any other.”
X-ray CT imaging of a singular lees molecule (LEFT), and a following calculable component filigree generated from a micro-CT images (RIGHT).
He adds, “Granular component is a second many rubbed component in a tellurian industry—second usually to water—so a elemental believe we benefit will have inclusive consequences, from assisting engineers make some-more fit and safer designs for mining and containment of subterraneous explosions to comment of trembler damages. It is essential that we encourage partnership since that is how we will allege a field.”
In 2015, Sun also perceived the U.S. Army’s Young Investigator Program award from Army Research Office to indication how little H2O and atmosphere seepages inside any pore of granular materials, such as sand, silt, and sediment, impact a temperament ability and fortitude of a ground. In further to a YIP awards, Sun recently won a three-year $800,000 extend from a U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy University Programs, that supports university-led chief appetite investigate and growth projects to rise innovative technologies and solutions.
His project, “An Integrated Multiscale Experimental-Numerical Analysis on Reconsolidation of Salt-Clay Mixture for Disposal of Heat-Generating Waste,” will investigate a thermal-mechanical-hydrologic-chemical coupling outcome on reconsolidated granular (or crushed) salt-clay reduction used for sign systems of shafts and drifts in salt repositories. “We consider that adding some volume of clay in a re-consolidated clay reduction might make salt, an roughly inviolable material, even reduction permeable so that these materials can be used as sealant for chief rubbish storage sites,” he says. “We will be displaying and building numerical simulations of a extended operation of scenarios to see if that’s a box and to know how and because such a tiny volume of clay creates such a large disproportion on a engineering properties of a salt.”
—by Holly Evarts
