Overview

Granular materials, essentially a large collection of macroscopic particles, e.g. sand, coal, cereals, food grains etc., occur widely in nature and are handled commonly in industry. Despite being one of the most widely processed materials in the industry (e.g., cement industry, mining industry, pharmaceutical industry, food and beverages industry etc.), their behaviour remains poorly understood. My research is aimed at fundamental understanding of flow, rheology and behaviour of complex fluids, particularly that with particles, to understand the dynamics and behaviour of dry and wet particulate solids, granular suspensions, pastes etc. and their connections to continuum theories. I utilize computer simulations along with experiments to gain fundamental insights at the grain level interactions of dry/wet particulate systems and use this information to achieve better formulations for continuum modelling and improve the equipment design and operation of these widely processed and poorly understood class of materials.

Recent Publications

• A. Tripathi, H. Shum and A. C. Balazs, “Fluid-driven motion of passive cilia enables the layer to expel sticky particles ”, Soft Matter, 10 (9), 1416 - 1427 (2014).
• A. Tripathi, A. Bhattacharya and A. C. Balazs,“Size selectivity in cilia-particle interactions: Mimicking the behaviour of suspension feeders”, Langmuir, 29 (14), 4616 (2013).
• A. Tripathi and D. V. Khakhar,“Density difference-driven segregation in a dense granular flow”, J. Fluid Mech., 717, 643 (2013).
• A. Tripathi and D. V. Khakhar, “Rheology of binary granular mixtures in the dense flow regime”, Phys. Fluids, 23, 113302 (2011).
• A. Tripathi and D. V. Khakhar, “Numerical simulation of the sedimentation of a sphere in a sheared granular fluid: A gra nular Stokes experiment”, Phys. Rev. Lett, 107, 108001, (2011).
• A. Tripathi and D. V. Khakhar, “Steady flow of smooth, inelastic particles on a bumpy inclined plane: Hard and soft particle sim ulations”, Phys. Rev. E, 81, 041307 (2010).