Related papers: Intrusion in heterogeneous materials: Simple globa…

Intrusions into granular media are common in natural and engineered settings (e.g. during animal locomotion and planetary landings). While intrusion of complex shapes in dry non-cohesive granular materials is well studied, less is known…

Soft materials often display complex behaviors that transition through apparent solid- and fluid-like regimes. While a growing number of microscale simulation methods exist for these materials, reduced-order models that encapsulate the…

We analyze the capabilities of various recently developed techniques, namely Resistive Force Theory (RFT) and continuum plasticity implemented with the Material Point Method (MPM), in capturing dynamics of wheel--dry granular media…

Granular intrusions, such as dynamic impact or wheel locomotion, are complex multiphase phenomena where the grains exhibit solid-like and fluid-like characteristics together with an ejected gas-like phase. Despite decades of modeling…

Granular media (GM) present locomotor challenges for terrestrial and extraterrestrial devices because they can flow and solidify in response to localized intrusion of wheels, limbs, and bodies. While the development of airplanes and…

For robots to navigate safely and efficiently on soft, granular terrains, it is crucial to gather information about the terrain's mechanical properties, which directly affect locomotion performance. Recent research has developed robotic…

This work summarizes a series of studies on two-dimensional granular impact, where an intruding object strikes a granular material at high speed. Many previous studies on granular impact have used a macroscopic force law, which is dominated…

Characterizing forces on deformable objects intruding into sand and soil requires understanding the solid and fluid-like responses of such substrates and their effect on the state of the object. The most detailed studies of intrusion in dry…

We study the dynamics of an intruder moving through a fluidized granular medium in three dimensions ($d=3$). The intruder and grains have both translational and rotational degrees of freedom. The energy-dissipation mechanism is solid…

Predicting the force exerted on an object as it penetrates a granular medium is of interest in engineering, locomotive, and geotechnical applications. Current models of granular drag, however, vary widely in applicability and…

When an intruder strikes a granular material from above, the grains exert a stopping force which decelerates and stops the intruder. Many previous studies have used a macroscopic force law, including a drag force which is quadratic in…

We measure the quasi-static friction force acting on intruders moving downwards into a granular medium. By utilizing different intruder geometries, we demonstrate that the force acts locally normal to the intruder surface. By altering the…

We study experimentally and computationally the dynamics of granular flow during impacts, where intruders strike a collection of disks from above. In the regime where granular force dynamics are much more rapid than the intruder motion, we…

Density functional theory (DFT) is an indispensable ab initio method in both quantum chemistry and condensed matter physics. Based on recent advancements in reduced density matrix functional theory (RDMFT), a variant of DFT that is believed…

While the theory of diffusion of a single Brownian particle in confined geometries is well-established by now, we discuss here the theoretical framework necessary to generalize the theory of diffusion to dense suspensions of strongly…

We present a general simulation approach for incompressible fluid--structure interactions in a fully Eulerian framework using the reference map technique (RMT). The approach is suitable for modeling one or more rigid or finitely-deformable…

Granular materials such as sand, powders, and food grains are ubiquitous in civil engineering, geoscience, agriculture, and medicine. While the influence of friction between the grains on the static structure of these systems is well…

Granular intrusion is commonly observed in natural and human-made settings. Unlike typical solids and fluids, granular media can simultaneously display fluid-like and solid-like characteristics in a variety of intrusion scenarios. This…

A density functional theory (DFT) that accounts for van der Waals (vdW) interactions in condensed matter, materials physics, chemistry, and biology is reviewed. The insights that led to the construction of the Rutgers-Chalmers van der Waals…

Classical density functional theory (DFT) is a statistical mechanical theory for calculating the density profiles of the molecules in a liquid. It is widely used, for example. to calculate the density distribution of the molecules in the…