Yida Zhang
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Engineering·Early-career
Soils and porous materials are not fixed solids. Grains of sand slowly crush under heavy loads, and nanoporous materials such as cellulose swell and shrink as they take up water.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
geomechanics
geotechnical engineering
granular materials
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- 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.
- Trace the chain of small breakage events that leads to creep, the slow ongoing deformation of crushable soils, and quantify how their strength and water-flow behavior change as gradation shifts.
- Develop a gradation-enriched constitutive theory linking sand critical-state behavior to grain-size evolution, and use it to assess the short- and long-term stability of one of the world's tallest tailings dams.
- Test whether disjoining pressure and surface tension at the pore scale can predict sorption-induced swelling of soft nanoporous materials, using a continuum theory based on the thermodynamics of mixtures.
- Derive pore-scale adsorption forces from molecular dynamics simulations and simplified pore models tied to adsorption isotherms, upscale them by statistical homogenization, and validate the predictions for amorphous cellulose taking up water vapor.
More about the research
These hidden, gradual changes can threaten the safety of large earth structures or be harnessed to make materials that move on their own. Both projects ask how small-scale changes inside granular and porous materials add up to large-scale deformation, and how to predict it with mechanics theories and computer models.
Why it matters
Slow grain crushing and creep can weaken embankments, railway ballast and tall tailings dams. Better models of how soil gradation evolves could help engineers judge whether these structures will stay safe as they age and face extreme loads. Predicting how nanoporous materials swell when they absorb moisture could also guide the design of moisture-driven actuators, sensors and artificial muscles, and improve predictions of moisture-driven movement in materials such as cement and cellulose.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
CAREER: Decoding The Spatiotemporal Evolution of Soil Gradation under Severe Loadings: A New Paradigm for Stability Assessment of Critical Geo-Structures
NSF · Sep 2023 – Aug 2028
Collaborative Research: Multiscale Mechanics of Adsorption-Deformation Coupling in Soft Nanoporous Materials
NSF · Dec 2021 – Nov 2026
Closest labs
Jack Montgomery
Auburn University, AL·Engineering·Early-career
Use X-ray micro-CT imaging to determine how soil microstructure controls subsurface erosion rates in unsaturated soils.
Kenneth Kamrin
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Engineering
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.
Xinpeng Zhao
Michigan State University, MI·Materials Science
Establish how moisture changes heat flow in cellulose-based porous materials by making samples with controlled fiber sizes and pore structures and measuring their thermal conductivity across humidity levels.
The school
University of Colorado Boulder: 36 labs on PI Pages, $718M a year on research, 447 research doctorates a year.
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