IAS and CIVL Cohost 2020 “IAS Workshop on Emerging Scales in Granular Media”
Granular media — the second most handled materials on Earth after water — are important to wide-ranging fields of engineering including civil, chemical, mining and petroleum, and a host of industries such as pharmaceutical and powder. Granular media’s responses to various loads, including thermo, hydro, mechanical, chemical and magnetic-electro, can be intricate and complicated, and are critical to both conventional energy sectors (oil/petroleum, powder, geoscience) and emerging fields such as additive manufacturing (3D printing), locomotion robotics (robot-topology interactions) and planetary exploration (Mars/moon landing). However, a unified theoretical understanding of granular media has remained one of the major scientific challenges for decades, though multi-scale modeling and characterization approaches and technologies have proven to be what will drive the demystification of the behavior of granular media, for the benefit of both engineering and science communities.
To foster worldwide synergy on possible solutions to address the grand challenges on granular media, the 2020 “IAS Workshop on Emerging Scales in Granular Media” was successfully held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), 14-16 January 2020. The workshop was financially supported by the HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), the Croucher Foundation, the K. C. Wong Education Foundation, and HKUST’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The workshop was co-organized under the auspices of TC105 Micro to Macro Geomechanics of ISSMGE as a special event, and was co-chaired by Associate Professor Jidong Zhao of HKUST and Associate Professor Zhenyu Yin of PolyU. The welcome speech was given by CLP Holdings Professor of Sustainability Charles W. W. Ng, who is also Associate Vice-President (Research and Graduate Studies), President of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, and represents HKUST, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and ISSMGE.
The three-day workshop presented a total of 41 keynote talks (plus one canceled talk) in twelve plenary sessions, delivered by top researchers from around the world working in the broad area of granular media (see workshop program at http://ias.ust.hk/events/202001esgm/), and drew over 50 registered participants. Twenty-one of the invited speakers came from top universities around the world including UC Berkeley, MIT, Columbia, Northwestern, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Colorado School of Mines, Cambridge, Grenoble, University of Twente, University of Sydney, and Monash; seven were from mainland China, including from Tsinghua, Zhejiang, and Shanghai Jiaotong; 13 were from local universities.
The speakers devoted their talks to topical subjects, covering the latest advances in theoretical, experimental and computational studies of granular media pertaining to their scientific challenges and engineering performances — including particle-fluid interaction, statistical granular mechanics, granular physics, multi-scale modeling methodologies and applications, micromechanics and homogenization, failure of cohesive geomaterials, innovation in experimental geomechanics, constitutive modeling, big-data and machine learning — and the workshop served as a platform for these top scientists and scholars working on the multi-scale modeling of granular media to mix and mingle, and discuss and suggest possible solutions to the above issues. As commended by keynote speaker Prof. Felix Darve of Grenoble, Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics as “probably the most important event for the geomechanics community in 2020”, the workshop endeavors to foster far-reaching scientific ideas and perspectives that will shape the future of research on granular media.
Workshop chair Prof. Zhao has been particularly pleased with the scientific rigor and quality of the workshop, and has been greatly appreciative of all invited speakers, both local and international, for their generous support, in particular for committing to making their trips to attend the workshop amidst many uncertainties.
Prof. Zhao currently leads CIVL’s Computational Geomechanics Lab and directs the MSc program Civil and Infrastructural Engineering and Management (CIEM) at HKUST. He is also Co-editor for top geotechnical journal Computers and Geotechnics (Elsevier), the prestigious interdisciplinary journal Granular Matter (Springer Nature), Associate Editor for the ASCE Journal of Engineering Mechanics, as well as board member for several other mainstream geotechnical journals.
