Conference EMMC20
S14: Mechanics of porous and granular materials
Abstract submission (Easychair platform)
Anthony Thornton, University of Twente, The Netherlands, email
Ugo Galvanetto, University of Padova, Italy, email
Symposium description
Porous and granular materials are central to numerous scientific and engineering challenges, spanning disciplines such as geomechanics, powder technology, and material science. This minisymposium focuses on advancing the physics-based and numerical modelling of these materials by explicitly accounting for their disordered, highly inhomogeneous microstructure.
Traditional mean-field approaches often rely on scalar quantities like porosity or void ratio. However, recent studies highlight the importance of considering the full distribution of local porosities, spatial correlations, and particle-scale features—such as shape, size distribution, and higher-order structural descriptors—to accurately predict macroscopic behaviour or design microstructures for targeted functionality.
Cohesive and cemented granular materials, common in agro-foods, ceramics, metals, and geomaterials (e.g., rocks, concrete), have received comparatively less attention than cohesionless systems, despite their importance. These materials exhibit a unique interplay between granular and porous characteristics, often featuring stress concentration at both pore and contact scales. Understanding the evolution of particle shape—particularly in grinding, crushing, and natural flows—is another emerging frontier. Equally, capturing frictional and dilatant behaviour in rapid flows, or transient deformation under cyclic loading, remains an open challenge.
Although granular and porous materials share many scientific concerns, interactions between these communities remain limited. This minisymposium seeks to foster cross-disciplinary exchange and welcomes contributions addressing either or both material classes. We particularly encourage work that leverages open-source tools, reproducible computational workflows, and community-developed software to study flow, deformation, and microstructural evolution. Topics of interest include experimental approaches (e.g., imaging, tomography, digital volume correlation), poromechanical couplings, and recent progress in constitutive and numerical modelling across scales.
Topics include (but are not limited to):
- Cohesive granular materials
- Particle and void shape effects
- Compaction and flow of breakable particles
- Microstructure–property relationships and upscaling
- Deformation mechanisms, strain localisation, and instabilities
- Multiphysics couplings and transport phenomena
- Surface effects, adsorption, and capillarity
- Constitutive models for granular and porous media
- Novel computational methods and simulation frameworks
- Open-source software, reproducible modelling, and data sharing initiatives