Prof. Robert Behringer will receive two grants this year to pursue his research in granular materials and thin liquid films. They are from NASA and NSF, and Behringer will serve as lead PI and co-PI, respectively, on these projects.
Prof. Robert Behringer will receive an award of $310,000 from NASA for a joint European Space Agency-NASA project, "Compaction and Sound in Granular Matter – comp.gran". This is an international collaboration to understand the propagation of sound in granular materials by exploiting the special properties of reduced gravity. The lead PI on the project is Matthias Sperl, a former Duke post-doc who now heads up a group at the DLR in Cologne Germany. The DLR is the German equivalent of NASA. Additional PI's include Matthias Schrötter, from the Max-Planck-Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen Germany Eric Clément, Professor at the University Pierre et Marie Curie and at the E.S.P.C.I, Paris, and Stefan Luding, who is a professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Prof. Robert Behringer is co-PI on a recent multi-institutional award from NSF applied Math (DMS) to understand the dynamics of thin liquid films. The project is "FRG-Collaborative Research: The Dynamics of Thin Liquid Films: Mathematics and Experiments" The other PI's are Karen E. Daniels, (NC State University and former Duke post-doc) Rachel Levy (Harvey Mudd College), Michael Shearer (NC State University) and Thomas P. Witelski (Duke Math).
Department of Physics
