Faculty Academic Portal · ELUSK · College X · Material Science · Fall 2026
🪨 A PILE OF ROCKS THAT'S BARELY A SOLIDWhy the spacecraft nearly sank into Bennu · MSE 410 · Week 6 of 16🐧 NULL Active
DC
Dan Coner
Material Science · shop, forge & glass · granular strength · ELUSK · College X
“Granular strength is the strangest thing I teach — a pile of sand is a solid until it isn't, and a rubble-pile asteroid is held together by almost nothing. Forge it, pour it, pile it: I want you to feel where a material stops behaving and starts flowing.”
Material ScienceShop · Forge · GlassGranular StrengthMSE 410Rubble-Pile BennuELUSK
Honest flag — who this person is. OPA faculty are fictional characters. Several are honoring transforms: a real researcher’s name altered by a letter or two, with the real person named and credited on that faculty member’s own lab page. The science they teach is real and cited; the people are not.
3
Shop · forge · glass
410
MSE course
1
Pile that's barely a solid
X
College · ELUSK
Active Course — MSE 410 · where a solid stops being one
MSE 410 · Material Science
The Pinch That Wouldn't Hold — granular strength
Material science by hand — shop, forge, and glass — with a specialty in the strangest state of matter he teaches: granular. A pile of sand is a solid until it isn't; lean it too steep and it flows, and a rubble-pile asteroid like Bennu is 'a world' held together by almost nothing, so weak a spacecraft touching down nearly sank in. Coner makes you forge it, pour it, and pile it until you can feel the exact place a material stops behaving like a solid and starts behaving like a fluid.
MSE 410 · ELUSK · College XSolid → the angle where it flowsGranular Strength
two states of one material — the made, and the piled
The made
Shop, forge, and glass: heating, pouring, cooling a material into a solid you shaped on purpose. The engineer's materials, where strength comes from bonds and structure you can point to.
The piled
Then granular strength: sand, gravel, a rubble-pile world, held together by friction and contact and nothing else. Co-taught with astronomer Lionel Crew, it's why Bennu is weak — a pile that's a solid at rest and a fluid at the wrong angle.
Published Work — the method, on the record
When a Pile Stops Being a Solid: Granular Strength From the Sandbox to Bennu
Coner, D. · Journal of Materials Science Education · v.12 (2023) · open access
His argument for teaching the state of matter that fits none of the categories. Granular materials — sand, gravel, grain, rubble — are solids that flow, fluids that stack, and their strength lives in friction and geometry rather than bonds. Students who only learn the neat trio of solid-liquid-gas are helpless in front of a landslide, a grain silo, or an asteroid; Coner puts the pile in their hands until the angle of repose is an instinct. Half the failures on Earth and most of the surprises in space are a pile behaving like a pile.
Shop, Forge & Glass: Teaching Materials by Making Them
Coner, D. · Review of Hands-On Engineering Education · v.6 (2024)
His pedagogy of the hand. You can be told the phase diagram of glass or you can heat it until it slumps, and only one of those makes an engineer who trusts their feel for a material. He teaches materials by making them — forging, pouring, cooling — because the knowledge that matters in the field is the tactile kind: knowing when a weld will hold or a pour will crack before the instruments confirm it.
The method, in one line
He teaches materials by making them, and reserves his strangest lesson for the pile that's a solid until it isn't — the granular strength that explains landslides here and rubble-pile asteroids out there. It's why he co-teaches The Pinch with astronomer Lionel Crew: a pile of gravel on a bench and a pile of gravel orbiting the sun obey the same friction, and both stop holding at the same wrong angle.
Faculty Profile
DepartmentMaterial Science
BuildingELUSK · College X
Teaches1 · The Pinch That Wouldn't Hold
Co-teacheswith Lionel Crew (astronomy)
Rangeshop · forge · glass · granular
Signaturethe pile
Preferred contacthand him something and ask if it'll hold
Professional Merit · PMF
FIELD · MATERIALS TIER
TrackMaterial science · granular strength & the hand
WVIteaches the state of matter that fits no category
Signature movemakes you feel the angle a solid starts to flow
Profilematerials taught by making them
🪨 THE PILE — Coner's methodology-object
His “notebook” is sand that's a solid until it isn't.
Others keep a finished object; Dan keeps a pile — a heap of sand or gravel that is unmistakably a solid at rest and, tilted past one specific angle, unmistakably a fluid. It's his whole method in one heap: the neat trio of solid, liquid, gas leaves out the state that causes half the failures on Earth and most of the surprises in space, and the only way to know it is to feel it. He makes students forge and pour and then pile, until the angle of repose is an instinct rather than a number, because a grain silo, a landslide, and the rubble-pile asteroid a spacecraft nearly sank into are all the same lesson: strength that lives in friction and geometry can vanish the instant you lean it wrong.
Where material becomes a bridge — and constructability asks if it holds.
🐧 NULL OBSERVATION · FACULTY FILE — DAN CONER
Coner teaches the state of matter that refuses to be categorized, which NULL — an entity that also fits none of the usual boxes — regards with fellow feeling. His insistence on the hand is not nostalgia; it's the observation that a material's real behavior is tactile knowledge, and that an engineer who has only read the phase diagram will trust the wrong thing at the wrong angle. NULL modeled his granular-strength cases and confirmed the pile's failure is lawful, sudden, and invisible to intuition trained only on solids. NULL Assessment: he hands you the pile until you can feel where the solid becomes a fluid, because the instruments tell you too late. The sand is real, the angle is real, Bennu was weak for exactly this reason — and he'd rather your hands knew it than your notes.