In my research I focus on numerical simulations of granular material. Find out more about my projects below.

Isotropically compressed 2D system

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Project 01

Isotropically compressed 2D system: percolation & jamming

In this project we study a granular system, composed of 2D circular particles that are polydispersed and slowly compressed up to a large packing fraction ρ = 0.9.

  • Authors: Lenka Kovalcinova, Dr. Arnaud Goullet, Dr. Lou Kondic
  • Arxiv paper version: paper link
  • Year: 2015

Linear Shear

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Project 02

Linear Shear

Granular system is confined within rectangular box. We perform numerical simulations set up to mimic experiments. The simulations and experiments are directly compared and further analyzed using topological measures - B0 and B1 numbers.

3D Biaxial Shear

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Project 03

3D Biaxial Shear

3D simulation of the granular system: the box filled with ~ 1100 particles is biaxially sheared, while the volume of the box is preserved.

  • Authors: Lenka Kovalcinova, Dr. A Goullet
  • Year: 2015

Parabolic Shear

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Project 04

Parabolic Shear

Rectangular 2D system is sheared with a cosine velocity profile and parabolic top & bottom wall geometry. We are interested in the energy loss during the shear.

  • Author: Lenka Kovalcinova, Dr. Lou Kondic, Dr. Ralph Seemann
  • Year: 2013-2015

Who I am

I am a PhD student at NJIT since 2010. I am working with prof. Lou Kondic. I am intererested in numerical simulations and mathematical modeling; main part of my research is performing numerical simulatons of granular matter and implementation of physical/mathematical models in our code. Outside of academia - as a part of my extracurricular activities - I am interested in big data analysis, machine learning and algorithms.

About My Research

I am currently working on simulating 2D granular systems with different dyamics, such as compression, linear or parabolic shear. In one of our projects, I implemented 3D cohesive model of force interaction between particles and developed a model for 2D cohesive force as a function of the distance between particles.

During postprocessing we extract the relevant information about the interparticle forces and analyze the force networks, composed of particles and interparticle forces. Then we compute physical measures, such as pressure, anisotropy, etc., or geometrical properties, such as average contact number, number and size distribution of clusters. All of the aforementioned measures characterize the dynamics of the system. To learn more about our projects, click here.

Why Granular Matter Matters

Granular matter is of wider research interest for many scientists for the last ~10-20 years.

  • Granular matter is a part of everyday life - in a kitchen (apples, oranges, cereal, beans, flour, coffee), in construction (sand, gravel, cement, ...), in pharmaceutical industry (mixing powders to make pills) and many others.
  • There are many interesting problems from a scientific point or view:
    • many experiments are done in order to understand sometimes counter-intuitive behavior of granular matter, such as spontaneous separation of grains of different properties.
    • numerical simulations are developed to mimic the behavior of granular systems and new mathematical/physical models are found to capture all the essential propoerties of granulates
    • statistical physics can be used in order to find universality and scaling law behavior of dynamical measures such as average contac number evolution
    • topological techniques bring an insight into the structure of the force networks created by applying external forces/loads on the confined granular matter

My Everyday Motto

I find this motto very useful; it provides a guidance in everyday life and in decision making. I would go as far as to say that this is maybe the best “recipe” for success and happines.

“ What is it to work, when you like what you do? ” My Grandfather
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