Kenneth Kamrin
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Engineering
Sand, grain, powdered drugs and lunar soil all belong to the same awkward family of materials: collections of solid grains that sometimes behave like a solid and sometimes pour like a liquid. Engineers have never had a fully reliable way to predict how they will flow, and the problem gets harder off Earth.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
Materials Science
- Topics
granular flow
granular materials
dense granular media
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Test whether dense granular flows depend strongly on gravity magnitude by running rotating drum experiments aboard the International Space Station using the Multi-use Variable-gravity Platform centrifuge, spanning near-weightlessness to above Earth gravity.
- Measure flowing surface geometry and internal velocity fields in drums filled with materials from uniform beads to planetary regolith simulants, and compare them to theoretical gravity-dependent scaling laws.
- Extend continuum models, which treat grain piles as continuous materials, to low-gravity regimes by incorporating secondary effects such as inter-particle cohesion and particle softness that weak gravity amplifies.
- Calibrate and validate the models iteratively against paired ground and orbital experiments to identify which constitutive ingredients dominate at each gravity level, establishing predictive digital twins for granular processes.
More about the research
Missions to asteroids, the Moon and Mars will have to dig, pour and handle granular material under gravity far weaker than our own, where intuition built on terrestrial experience may not hold.
Why it matters
Granular materials are handled constantly in agriculture, pharmaceutical manufacturing and construction, and poor flow prediction causes jams, segregation and wasted product. Reliable gravity-aware models would let engineers design excavation, drilling and material-handling equipment for asteroid, lunar and Mars missions, where direct full-scale experimentation is impossible. The validated digital twins could substitute for experiments that cannot be performed off Earth.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jonathan Rothstein
University of Massachusetts, MA·Engineering
Measure how self-propelled Marangoni surfers move on levitating spherical water drops in microgravity aboard the International Space Station, focusing on how the drop's overall curvature changes their propulsion.
Yida Zhang
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Engineering·Early-career
Examine whether self-organization governs how grains in granular soils collectively break under slow, quasi-static loading, and test whether simple universal rules describe crushing in soils with any grain-size mix.
Yuhang Hu
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Engineering
Formulate thermodynamically consistent constitutive laws from statistical models of evolving polymer networks, so that growth, degrowth, remodeling and stiffness change emerge from coupled reaction, transport and deformation.
The school
University of California-Berkeley: 46 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 825 research doctorates a year.
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