DOCTORAL CANDIDATE
Simón Leyton Alarcón

SUPERVISORS
Bloen Metzger
Pierre Rognon

Physics, Granular Media, Mixing, Rheology, DEM

The problem of mixing granular media —like sand, sugar, or gravels— represents a considerable challenge for industry. It is also a mixing problem particularly interesting from a fundamental standpoint. For such athermal granular media, advection and diffusion are not independent: the particle diffusion results from the successive collisions between particles induced by the flow of the granular media. Mixing in this case is by essence a purely kinematic process: the state of the mixture does not depend on the speed at which the media is sheared – only the deformation should count.

This particularly intriguing and relevant mixing problem will be investigated systematically through experiments (two years in Marseille) at IUSTI-CNRS-Aix Marseille Université in France, and numerical simulations (one year in Australia) at Sydney University.