Saving Sand
Upscaling Predictions of Grainy Materials for Sustainability

Project by

Danny van der Haven
Early-Career Fellow 2024–2025

With a throughput of more than fifty billion tonnes per year, the sand-mining industry significantly impact on our economy, society, and environment. Different types of sand result in various material properties, such as concrete or asphalt. Consequently, the industry relies on tried-and-tested types of sand, often extracted from ecologically vulnerable areas. Our current lack of understanding of granular materials is a significant barrier to achieving current sustainability goals. This project aims to create a general computer model to effectively simulate billions of individual grains of sand, enabling meaningful predictions for dunes, dykes, concrete, and asphalt. Unlike fluids, there is no universal mathematical formulation to perform large-scale continuum simulations of granular materials. While simulating each grain is possible, even supercomputers can handle only a few million grains. This project plans to use local symmetries and coupled discrete and continuum computational methods to develop a large-scale prediction method and explore its applications to current material and sustainability challenges.