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Adapting granular materials through artificial evolution

Nature Materials volume 12, pages 326–331 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

Over 200 years after Coulomb’s studies1, a general connection between the mechanical response of a granular material and the constituents’ shape remains unknown2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. The key difficulty in articulating this relationship is that shape is an inexhaustible parameter, making its systematic exploration infeasible. Here we show that the role of particle shape can, however, be explored efficiently when granular design is viewed in the context of artificial evolution11. By introducing a mutable representation for particle shapes, we demonstrate with computer simulation how shapes can be evolved. As proof of principle, we predicted motifs that link shape to packing stiffness, discovered a particle that produces aggregates that stiffen—rather than weaken—under compression, and verified the results using three-dimensional printing. More generally, our approach facilitates the exploration of the role of arbitrary particle geometry in jammed systems, and invites the discovery and design of granular matter with optimized properties.

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Figure 1: The impact of particle shape on mechanical response.
Figure 2: Representing particle shapes with blueprints.
Figure 3: Evolving particle shapes to obtain the stiffest and softest packings.
Figure 4: Stiffest and softest particle shapes built from spheres up to n = 5.
Figure 5: Strain stiffening.

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. Brown, J. Ellowitz, S. Nagel, S. Waitukaitis and T. Witten for insightful discussions, and A. Athanassiadis and M. Collins for help with the 3D-printed particles. We would like to acknowledge and thank the Itasca Education Partnership (Itasca Consulting Group) for the contribution of software and technical support. This work was supported by the NSF through its MRSEC program (DMR-0820054) and by the US Army Research Office through grant W911NF-12-1-0182.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. James Franck Institute and Department of Physics, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA

    Marc Z. Miskin & Heinrich M. Jaeger

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  1. Marc Z. Miskin
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  2. Heinrich M. Jaeger
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Contributions

M.Z.M. and H.M.J. conceived the study and wrote the paper. M.Z.M. created the particle-shape representation, performed the simulations and experiments and analysed the data.

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Correspondence to Marc Z. Miskin.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Miskin, M., Jaeger, H. Adapting granular materials through artificial evolution. Nature Mater 12, 326–331 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3543

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