This actions is in response to the Major Research Instrumentation Initiative MRI'98 (NSF98-16). This action is to support the acquisition and development of unique materials testing equipment that would be used to characterize micro-mechanical behavior of granular media and computational facilities to be used for the development and implementation of constitutive models to describe material behavior, and numerical models to solve boundary-value problems.
The research equipment consists of a load device with a specimen and environmental chamber to be designed for use inside a recently purchased Digital Radiography-Computer tomography (DR/CT) scanner. Operation of this device permits DR/CT scans to be taken during loading of granular specimens, thereby allowing imaging of microstructural material transformations on the granular scale during the deformation process, leading to an understanding of deformation processes and failure mechanisms in various engineering materials where internal structural changes are important. The computational equipment consists of a workstation for the development and implementation of constitutive models.
This research and computational equipment will be shared by two research groups in the Department of Civil Engineering; whose focus is on the mechanical and thermodynamic behavior of granular materials. The cold regions group addresses snow and ice materials while the geotechnical group concentrates on soil and geosynthetic materials.
