Nathalie Vriend

Dr. Nathalie Vriend leads the Granular Flow Laboratory. She is an expert in performing detailed laboratory experiments and targeted field work involving particulate flows such as sand and snow. In addition, she also employs numerical simulations and theoretical modelling to complement observations, often in collaboration with scientists from multidisciplinary fields. She has active projects in granular rheology and avalanching, and dune structure and migration. In the past she worked on the dynamics of real snow avalanches, singing sand dunes, silo honking, and seismic wave propagation. Flowing granular materials arise everywhere around us, in industry from pharmaceutical processes to bulk goods transport lines, and in nature from snow avalanches to devastating landslides. To mitigate industrial economic losses and reduce hazards of naturally occurring flows, we need to be able to measure and model static and flowing granular materials, with transitions strongly depending on the spatial boundary conditions of the flow, external forcing, and time-dependent starting and stopping phenomena.