Fourth-year civil engineering doctoral student Mohmad Mohsin Thakur won first place in the American Society of Materials (ASM) graduate student poster competition for research with implications in carbon dioxide sequestration, among other areas.
Thakur, who is studying geotechnical engineering under Fred N. Peebles Professor and JIAM Chair of Excellence Dayakar Penumadu, is researching the role of partial saturation in hydromechanical behavior of granular materials, specifically looking at pore scale physics associated with multiphase flow behavior in granular materials.
With the help of an in-house X-ray CT imaging facility at UT, he is able to investigate the constitutive response of multiphase granular materials at pore scale. Additionally, his predictive simulations augment experimental results in improving fundamental understanding of the material response at multiple scales.
In addition to carbon dioxide sequestration, this research has the potential to impact rainfall induced slope instabilities and enhanced oil recovery.
Also of note, Thakur shared the runner-up prize with Mehdi Zadshir from Columbia University and Tingtao Zhou from MIT at the Engineering Mechanics Institute Conference for a paper competition on EMI Modeling Inelasticity and Multiscale Behavior for his report, “Micromechanical approach to model deformation response of granular materials using FEM considering meso-structure from X-ray computed tomography.”