Antoinette Tordesillas facts for kids

Antoinette A. Tordesillas is an amazing Australian mathematician. She is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Melbourne in Australia. She has helped us understand how "granular materials" work. Think of granular materials as things like sand, soil, or even grains of rice!

Professor Tordesillas has done some really cool things. For example, her research helps predict how soil on places like Mars or the Moon would behave if we tried to build, mine, or drill there. She also created a special computer model that can help figure out when and where landslides or earthquakes might happen by looking at how stable slopes are. She even won the J H Michell Medal in 2000 for her work!

Education and Career

Antoinette Tordesillas went to the University of Adelaide. She studied applied mathematics and chemistry, earning her first degree in 1986. For her special project, she created a model about how sheet metal is made using a process called hot-dip galvanising.

Later, she earned her PhD in solid mechanics in 1992 from the University of Wollongong. Her PhD focused on how rollers touch and coat surfaces.

After working at a couple of other universities, she joined the math and statistics department at the University of Melbourne in 1996. In 2013, she also started working in geomechanics there, which is about how the Earth's materials behave. She became a full professor in 2016.

At the University of Melbourne, Professor Tordesillas teaches math and statistics. She also leads a research group called the Micromechanics of Granular Media Group. Her research combines ideas from math, engineering, physics, and geophysics. She works with teams from all over the world and gets funding from big groups like NASA, the US National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Defense. A lot of her research is about understanding how granular materials move and how this knowledge can help us predict earthquakes or prepare for future space travel.

Research

Understanding Martian and Lunar Soil

Professor Tordesillas worked with NASA to study the soil on Mars and the Moon. Their goal was to understand how these surfaces would react if we tried to build, mine, or drill on them. NASA actually asked her to help because the US Army said she was the expert on sand!

To do this, Professor Tordesillas and her team at the University of Melbourne used information and photos from orbiters and rovers that have explored space. They also studied how tiny grains behave. They tested fake space soil, used computers to model what happens when pressure is added, and looked at simpler models of perfect, round particles. They even thought about how the unique shapes of particles on Mars and the Moon might have formed. Professor Tordesillas realized that we need to understand many different local conditions before any future space landings. This research could also help with problems that come from storing granular materials here on Earth, like wheat, iron ore, and coal, which are important exports for Australia.

Predicting Seismic Activity

Professor Tordesillas received a big grant to create a model that can show a very detailed picture of individual grains. This helps her team see tiny changes that happen in granular materials right before they break or move. This is a huge step towards predicting earthquakes and stopping soil erosion from heavy military vehicles.

Professor Tordesillas and her team developed a special computer program. It uses applied mathematics and big data (which means huge amounts of information) to predict when and where landslides might happen, sometimes up to two weeks in advance! This model looks at lots of data to find places where future problems, like seismic activity, might occur. It flags locations where particles start moving in similar, organized ways. This happens just before a big movement or "failure" occurs. The program uses powerful computers to understand all this big data and turn it into a network that helps find hidden patterns. Catching these small changes early is key to predicting problems. This helps us use existing information to figure out risks and manage them better.

After five years of hard work, Professor Tordesillas and Robin Batterham created, tested, and patented a model called SSAFE. This model looks at how stable slopes are over time to predict when and where future problems will happen. It combines information from remote seismic sensors with the physics of how granular materials fail. This model can be used to predict problems in mines by looking at very precise measurements of how rock faces move. It can also monitor rural areas where satellites collect radar data. The main goal of this work is to improve early warning systems and make landslides less dangerous, especially with changes in our climate.

Comminution and the removal of liquid from a material

In 2012, Professor Tordesillas and her colleagues filed a patent for a way to break down materials or remove liquid from them. This method involves feeding a material between two surfaces that are moving in opposite directions. This causes the material to shear, or slide, parallel to its direction of flow between the two surfaces.

Awards

In 2000, Professor Tordesillas was given the J H Michell Medal by the Australian and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics Society. This award is given every year to a new researcher who has done outstanding work in applied mathematics.