This award will help support a technical meeting entitled, ?12th Northeastern Granular Materials Workshop?. The conference, which will be held June 6, 2014 at Brown University in Providence, RI, will bring together about 50 leading researchers, postdoctoral students and graduate students to present their research on granular materials. Granular materials refer to fluid-particle systems composed of particles in air or in a liquid. Granular materials are found in many industrial, consumer, healthcare, and food products. Understanding the behavior of these materials will improve manufacturing efficiency, enhance product quality, reduce waste, and lead to the development of new advanced products. This workshop will provide researchers with an overview of current research in the field as well as stimulate new collaborations among participants. The workshop will enlist participation of young researchers, including junior faculty members, students, and post-doctoral students, who will be able to meet leaders in the field and their peers at other institutions.
The workshop will include presentations describing the latest experimental, theoretical and computational research on such topics as granular packing, jamming, rheology, flow, wave propagation, continuum models for discrete systems, porous media flows, and geomechanics. The workshop will also include research on related materials and other disordered and glassy systems, such as suspensions, emulsions, colloids, and foams. This broad view will help workshop participants to identify key similarities and differences between these classes of materials. Workshop participants will represent an array of academic fields, including engineering, physics and mathematics, which illustrates the interdisciplinary nature of research in granular systems.
