The discrete element method was used to simulate the micromechanics of failure in alpine snow, a bonded, granular material. The model was validated experimentally for both elastic response and damage work density in the specimen.

I used a micro-CT scanner to digitally reproduce material microstructure, wrote some image processing scripts to discretize the material into bonds and grains, and then modeled this bond-grain system in the YADE discrete element environment.

The model was validated experimentally using an analytic framework I developed to define upper and lower bounds for damage work density in the specimen.

Most notably, this project gave insight into the interaction between layers in snow avalanche initiation. It was the first known attempt to directly measure the spatial extents of the fracture process zone in snow.