This international collaboration between the PI and Reint de Boer of the University of Essen will simultaneously apply two complementary approaches to investigate a variety of important issues in the study of porous media. It will examine issues of effective stress principle, uplift, friction, and capillarity in compressible porous solids phase saturated with a compressible and an incompressible liquid, and a three-phase system. The Essen group uses a continuum thermomechanical macroscopic methodology to derive the balance equations and the associated constitutive expressions. The PI's group uses a micromechanical approach, based on a new application of the principles of classical ensemble averaging to porous media. An agreement between the results obtained by these two methods will be a substantial contribution to porous media theory in providing a computational algorithm to estimate many of the phenomenological constants in the macroscopic theory. The international collaboration will thus lead to improved modeling of saturated porous media, relevant to many disciplines such as soil mechanics, geophysics, civil and petroleum engineering, biomechanics, and materials processing.
