Associate ProfessorYixiang Gan

Project Opportunities

Title: Conduction in Compacted Granular Materials

Summary of opportunity:

This project will focus on developing a unified constitutive model for granular heat flow and electrical conduction by combining critical fine-scale effects emerging under extreme conditions, including grain plasticity, grain melting, grain convection, and thermal pressurisation, through particle-based micromechanics.

Opportunity synopsis:

Granular materials are frequently subjected to extreme loading conditions, i.e. conditions that involve high compaction, severe shearing and elevated temperatures. Understanding their thermo-mechanical and/or electro-mechanical behaviour is essential in many applications, e.g. for optimising and reducing risks in granular heat exchangers, fast charging and discharging phases in Li-ion batteries and resolving the rate-and-state behaviour in fault dynamics. Current model predictions are mostly limited to moderate loading conditions. The aim of this project is to quantify how the extreme phenomena of melting, grain plasticity, and thermal pressurisation affect heat flow and electrical conduction in granular media. This project will focus on developing both a novel computational approach and a rigorous homogenisation scheme to describe these emerging phenomena.

----------Current Research Projects----------

• Transport phenomena in porous media
• Multiscale mechanics of granular materials
• Mechanics of unsaturated soils
• Contact and interface mechanics
• Rough surfaces and grain morphology