Buscarnera Team Wins Geotechnical Research Medal for Study on Crushable Soils
The award given to Professor Giuseppe Buscarnera recognizes grain-scale insights that could improve design and reliability of engineered materials.
A team including Northwestern Engineering’s Giuseppe Buscarnera won the 2024 Geotechnical Research Medal given by the Institution of Civil Engineers and Emerald Publishing.
Buscarnera, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering, and his colleagues were honored for their paper “Insight Into Contact Forces in Crushable Sand Using Experiments and Predictive Particle-Scale Modelling,” published last year in Geotechnique. The award was given earlier this year for papers published in 2024.
Along with teammates Jose Andrade and John Harmon from the California Institute of Technology and McCormick alum Dawa Seo (PhD ’22), the group used a detailed computer model to recreate and crush real sand grains, showing that the virtual version behaved just like the real experiment. They found that big grains carry most of the load straight down the sample, while the smaller grains help keep everything stable from the sides. This work could help engineers design stronger, more reliable materials and predict how soils or aggregates will break down under heavy loads.
The paper was also profiled by Emerald Publishing in a feature underscoring the study’s contribution to understanding how grain-scale mechanics shape the behavior of crushable soils.
Buscanera’s research interests include constitutive modeling of variably saturated geomaterials, chemo-mechanics of porous rocks, material stability theory and its geo-engineering applications, fracture and crushing in granular materials, the forecasting of geohazards, such as landslides, and sustainable subsurface energy technologies.
The Institution of Civil Engineers is a global membership organization of some 97,000 civil engineers and has a history spanning more than two centuries. It provides professional qualifications, supports continued competence in the field, and serves as a source of expert, evidence-based guidance on infrastructure and sustainability for policymakers.