MEAM Seminar: “Sticky Situations: Cohesion in Granular Flows”
April 1 at 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
From silo discharge and granular avalanches to the erosion of granular beds, granular materials play a central role in many industrial and environmental processes. While significant advances have been made in understanding the statics and dynamics of cohesionless grains, the role of interparticle adhesion, which fundamentally alters bulk rheology and transport mechanisms, remains elusive. In this talk, we will discuss recent experimental efforts to systematically control and characterize model cohesive granular materials, allowing us to quantify the impact of cohesion in various configurations. By using model adhesive grains, we probe the role of interparticle adhesion in several canonical flow scenarios: granular discharge from a silo, where cohesion governs clogging onset and flow rate reduction; erosion of a granular bed by an impinging turbulent jet, where cohesive forces delay particle entrainment; and the collapse of a cohesive granular column, where cohesion enhances stability. These experiments provide a framework to rationalize the dynamics of cohesive granular materials, bridging the gap between idealized numerical models and real-world applications. The study of cohesive granular materials offers predictive frameworks for controlling granular materials in engineering applications, with implications ranging from powder handling in industrial processes to geophysical flows.
Alban Sauret
Associate Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California at Santa Barbara
Alban Sauret is a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park since 2025. After obtaining a BS, MS, and PhD in Physics in France and completing a Postdoctoral Research position at Princeton University (USA), he joined the CNRS in France between 2014 and 2018 in a joint academic-industrial laboratory with Saint-Gobain. He was then a faculty member at UC Santa Barbara between 2018 and 2024. His research lies at the intersection of fluid mechanics, soft matter, interfacial dynamics, and granular physics, aiming to understand the dynamics of multiphase systems for a broad range of applications, from manufacturing to water sustainability and geosciences. He has received various awards, such as a Soft Matter Emerging Investigator Award in 2017 and a Pioneering Investigator Award in 2024 from the Royal Society of Chemistry, an NSF CAREER Award in 2020, an American Physical Society Milton van Dyke Award in 2021, and an ASME Rising Star of Mechanical Engineering Award in 2024.