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SUMMARY:MechE Colloquium: Granular and Building Materials in Space
DTSTART:20230516T120000
DTEND:20230516T130000
DTSTAMP:20260510T221635Z
UID:911ec085e27f398a8eb0c574d026e496118baaa71e2857b9f06f1552
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Matthias Sperl\, Institute of Materials Physics in Space
 \, German Aerospace Center (DLR)\nAbstract: Granular matter presents a cha
 llenge to its physical description because granular particles lose energy 
 upon collision among each other and can hence only be found in a steady dy
 namical state under continuous agitation. Granular matter is therefore at 
 the same time a fundamental example of non-equilibrium physics as well as 
 a highly relevant system for applications in industrial processes and for 
 space exploration.\n\nFor the reasons above\, granular matter benefits in 
 multiple ways from investigations in low and zero gravity for widely diffe
 rent densities one may call granular gases\, fluids\, and solid packings. 
 In addition\, grains form the raw material for future space exploration to
  planetary bodies\, most prominently the Moon. Here\, many engineering pro
 cesses need to be in part reinvented with additional physical insight to a
 llow for utilization of resources found on site.\n\nBack on Earth\, these 
 investigations shall help clarify some foundations for building materials 
 such as concrete which is responsible for more CO2 emission than aviation.
  The talk shall address the three pillars of research in microgravity\, Lu
 nar exploration\, as well as applications on Earth.\n\nBiography: Matthias
  Sperl studied physics at the Technical University of Munich with stays at
  the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the Santa Fe Institute
 . He graduated with a PhD from the Technical University of Munich in 2003 
 about theories of glass-transition singularities predicting novel amorphou
 s states that were later identified in both computer simulations and exper
 iments. 2004-2006 Matthias Sperl did an experimental postdoc at Duke Unive
 rsity\, USA\, moving on from thermal disordered systems (glasses) towards 
 athermal granular media. After a stay as guest researcher at the Universit
 y of Göttingen in 2006/2007 where he also returned as a temporary profess
 or in 2009\, he moved to Cologne\, Germany\, joining the German Aerospace 
 Center (DLR) in 2007 and the faculty of the University of Cologne in 2016 
 as professor of theoretical physics. At DLR he heads a group performing th
 eory\, numerical simulations as well as experiments in the laboratory and 
 on microgravity platforms. He has performed experiments personally on more
  than 500 parabolas\, executed launches in drop towers and on sounding roc
 kets\, and is the principal investigator of several instruments on the Int
 ernational Space Station (ISS). He was awarded the Robert-Wichard-Pohl Med
 al for excellence in teaching in 2009\; he led the efforts of the European
  Space Agency in 2016 and again in 2020 for the roadmaps in soft-matter in
  space. For the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG)
  in 2020/2021 he served in the gap analysis group for in-situ resource uti
 lization (ISRU).
LOCATION:MED 0 1418 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==MED%200%201418 https://epf
 l.zoom.us/j/64230566011
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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