The impact of a PEER funded research project, "Micro-inspired Continuum Modeling Using Virtual Experiments," is highlighted below. The project Principal Investigator (PI) is José E. Andrade, George W. Housner Professor of Civil & Mechanical Engineering, Caltech. The research team includes John Harmon, Graduate Research Assistant, Caltech
Download the Research Project Highlight which includes the abstract. (PDF)
Research Impact:
The LS-DEM work builds on 10 years of collaboration between the geomechanics group and the University of Grenoble Alps. Efforts have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), and others. However, the work has been focused on the development of the LS-DEM tool and its potential application to monotonic loading. The work proposed herein is the first attempt to use the tool beyond monotonic loading and consider different stress paths, including cyclic loading. New experimental results demonstrate the ability of the LS-DEM technique to capture cyclic loading.
The potential impact on practice is large since this work could enable better predictions of soil behavior and help model challenging problems such as liquefaction instabilities.