I am writing to invite your contirbution to the mini-symposium on failure and instability in soft materials and geomaterials co-organized by myself, Joshua White, Pencheng Fu, Nikolaos Bouklas, Wei Wang and Christian Linder for the upcoming ICCM conference at Berkeley.

More information can be found in the URL listed below. 
http://www.sci-en-tech.com/ICCM/index.php/iccm2016/2016/schedConf/trackP...
The conference will take place from August 1st to 4th. 

Organizers:

WaiChing Sun, Columbia University
Joshua White, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Pengcheng Fu, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Nikolaos Bouklas, University of Texas at Austin
Wei Wang, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Christian Linder, Stanford University

Scope:

Soft materials and geomaterials both respond to environmental stimuli, such as mechanical and multi-physical loads, in the form of large deformations. Most of the geomaterials such as sand, clay, or shale are natural products of geological processes, such as weathering, sedmentation and erosion.  On the other hand, soft materials can be engineered, like polymers, gels, colloids, and foams, or appear in natural form as biological tissues.  The fundamental understanding of failure mechanisms and instabilities in these materials has become a topic of active research. In geomaterials, strain localization may occur at vanishing wave propagation speed or when the acoustic tensor becomes singular. Onset of instability can be used as a technique to actively trigger rapid and significant changes in the geometry and properties of soft materials. The main objective for the mini-symposium is to bring together researchers working on the mechanics of soft materials and those working on geomaterials to exchange recent advances and to inspire new ideas, unifying these often-distinct areas of research. Researchers are invited to present their recent work on topics included but not restricted to:

-Mathematical frameworks to predict and model material instabilities and failure

-Regularization techniques such as rate-dependent models, gradient or nonlocal methods, and high-order continua to avoid ill-posedness.

-Diffusive damage and sharp discontinuity techniques to model failure.

-Multiscale models for materials at post-bifurcation regimes.

-Homogenization and concurrent multiscale methods to couple spatial and temporal scales.
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-Evolution of fabric and microstructures.

Kun Wang, WaiChing Sun, a semi-implicit discrete-continuum coupling method for two-phase wetted granular solid based on the effective stress principle at finite strain

Place:  Plasticity of Granular and Geomaterials IV (Room: Mauna Kea) Sheraton Kona 
Time: Wednesday January 6th 5pm - 5:30pm.
URL: http://www.internationalplasticity.com/indexSK.htm