This award provides support for the participation of ten US scientists in a joint US-Japan seminar on "Micromechanics of Granular Materials". Granular material is an assembly of discrete particles, the macroscopic behavior of which is significantly influenced by the properties of those individual particles and their interactions. A wide range of engineering problems involve characterizing and handling granular materials, and solutions to these problems often rely on phenomenological formulas. To improve these phenomenological formulations, much research is undertaken aimed at increasing our understanding of how microscopic information relates to the macroscopic behavior of granular materials. Research undertaken by US and Japanese scientists in this area is complementary, US researchers concentrating on the formulation of rapidly deforming granular flows and the utilization of computer simulation, and Japanese researchers concentrating on the mathematical description and physical experiments of discrete systems. This seminar should therefore provide an excellent forum for scientists from each country to exchange results and discuss future research in this area. The seminar will be held on August 5-9, 1991 at Clarkson University, Postdam, New York. The co-organizers are Professor Hayley Shen, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Clarkson University, and Professor Masao Satake, Department of Civil Engineering, Tohoku University, Japan. Specific topics to be discussed at the seminar include (1) constitutive relations with internal variables; (2) transiti- onal behavior including elastic to plastic, quasi-static and rapid deformation; and (3) two-phase flows. This will be the fourth seminar in a series that started in 1978. The prior seminars have been very valuable and the published proceedings well respected. This seminar will allow this successful cooperation between the two countries to continue, and should lead to further exchanges of information and more extensive research collaboration.
