DOCTORAL CANDIDATE
Simón Leyton Alarcón

SUPERVISORS
Pierre Rognon, Aix Marseille Université (AMU)
Bloen Metzger, The University of Sydney (USYD)

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.