Publications related to Water content

Evolution of water content and suction of Opalinus Clay from recovery at the drilling site to handling in the laboratory

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Angelica Tuttolomondo

Advanced geotechnical engineering applications, such as shale gas extraction, CO2 geological sequestration, and geological radioactive waste storage, often involve various types of shales located at significant depths. Shales exhibit mechanical properties ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Water-permeation sensor and method for making the same

Yves Leterrier, Stéphanie Lacour, Kyungjin Kim, Massimo Mariello

A water permeation sensor suitable for monitoring and quantitatively assessing ultra-low permeability of thin film encapsulations engineered for bioelectronic microdevices, its fabrication as well as device comprising the same are disclosed herein. ...

2024

Water weakening and the compressive brittle strength of carbonates: Influence of fracture toughness and static friction

Marie Estelle Solange Violay, Corentin Jean-Marie Rémi Noël, Barnaby Padraig Fryer

Water is ubiquitous within the pore space of rocks and has been shown to affect their physical and mechanical behaviour. Indeed, water can act on the rock strength via mechanical (i.e., reducing the effective stresses) or chemical effects (e.g., mineral di ...

2024

Mode I fracture of thick adhesively bonded GFRP composite joints for wind turbine rotor blades

Véronique Michaud, Anastasios Vassilopoulos, Jialiang Fan

This article investigates the effects of voids, joint geometry, and test conditions on the quasi-static Mode I fracture performance of thick adhesive Double Cantilever Beam (DCB) joints such as those prevailing in wind industry and shipbuilding. The specim ...

2024

INFLUENCE OF VOIDS ON THICK DCB JOINT BEHAVIOR

Véronique Michaud, Anastasios Vassilopoulos, Jialiang Fan

The influence of voids on the quasi-static Mode I fracture performance of thick adhesive joints was investigated in this article. Double Cantilever Beam (DCB) joints were manufactured with glass fiber reinforced epoxy adherends and SikaPower®-830 epoxy adh ...

2023

Global Mapping of Potential and Climatic Plant‐Available Soil Water

Sara Bonetti, Dani Or

The estimation of plant-available soil water (PASW) is essential to quantify transpiration fluxes, the onset of heatwaves, irrigation water management, land-use decisions, vegetation ecology, and land surface memory in climate models. PASW is the amount of ...

2023

Chronic warming and dry soils limit carbon uptake and growth despite a longer growing season in beech and oak

Charlotte Grossiord, Yann Vitasse, Margaux Clara Lou Didion-Gency

Progressively warmer and drier climatic conditions impact tree phenology and carbon cycling with large consequences for forest carbon balance. However, it remains unclear how individual impacts of warming and drier soils differ from their combined effects ...

Oxford Univ Press Inc2023

Pore-pressure coefficients for unsaturated soils: generalized effective stress approach

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Angelica Tuttolomondo

Geotechnical problems with total stress changes occurring rapidly relative to the soil consolidation time can be conveniently addressed using an effective stress-based approach. For saturated states, analytical formulations of pore-pressure coefficients ad ...

CANADIAN SCIENCE PUBLISHING2023

Stable MXene Dough with Ultrahigh Solid Fraction and Excellent Redispersibility toward Efficient Solution Processing and Industrialization

Frank Nüesch, Jakob Heier, Shungui Deng

Two-dimensional (2D) transition metal carbides, and/or nitrides, so-called MXenes, have triggered intensive research interests in applications ranging from electrochemical energy storage to electronics devices. Producing these functional devices by printin ...

WILEY2023

The influence of water-saturation on the strength of volcanic rocks and the stability of lava domes

Marie Estelle Solange Violay, Michael Heap

The rocks forming a volcanic edifice or dome are typically saturated or partially-saturated with water. However, most experiments aimed at better understanding the mechanical behaviour of volcanic rocks have been performed on dry samples, and therefore mos ...

2023

Interactions between beech and oak seedlings can modify the effects of hotter droughts and the onset of hydraulic failure

Charlotte Grossiord, Eugénie Isabelle Mas, Hervé Cochard, Janisse Deluigi, Margaux Clara Lou Didion-Gency, Fernando Valladares

center dot Mixing species with contrasting resource use strategies could reduce forest vulnerability to extreme events. Yet, how species diversity affects seedling hydraulic responses to heat and drought, including mortality risk, is largely unknown. Using ...

Wiley2023

Life cycle environmental assessment of retaining walls in unsaturated soils

Alessio Ferrari, Gianluca Speranza

Retaining structures above groundwater level support soils that are usually in a state of partial saturation and subject to the actions of atmospheric agents. The current design approach considers the possible extremes of soil conditions - either totally d ...

ELSEVIER2022

Freezing-induced stiffness and strength anisotropy in freezing clayey soil: Theory, numerical modeling, and experimental validation

Gioacchino Viggiani, Edward Carlo Giorgio Andò

This paper presents a combined experimental-modeling effort to interpret the coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical behaviors of the freezing soil, where an unconfined, fully saturated clay is frozen due to a temperature gradient. By leveraging the rich experimen ...

WILEY2022

Increasing temperature and vapor pressure deficit lead to hydraulic damages in the absence of soil drought

Pascal Turberg, Charlotte Grossiord, Eugénie Isabelle Mas, Laura Mekarni, Philipp Schuler, Leonie Corine Schönbeck

Temperature (T) and vapor pressure deficit (VPD) are important drivers of plant hydraulic conductivity, growth, mortality, and ecosystem productivity, independently of soil water availability. Our goal was to disentangle the effects of T and VPD on plant h ...

Wiley2022

Improved framework to estimate travel time and derived distributions in hydrological control volumes

Mitra Asadollahi

Crossing properties of soil saturation, defined as the duration and excursion of soil saturation below and above certain thresholds, are key variables to ecosystem functioning and evolution by primarily influencing the plant and soil microbes physiological ...

EPFL2022

Role of Stress History on the Swelling-Shrinkage Behavior of Compacted Scaly Clay

Alessio Ferrari

Compacted scaly clays are complex geomaterials widely used for the realization of dam cores and waste dump liners. This research aims to investigate the swelling/shrinkage behavior of these geomaterials subjected in an oedometric cell to complex hydromecha ...

ASCE-AMER SOC CIVIL ENGINEERS2022

Weakening effect of various pore fluids on the tensile strength of granite

Guanyi Lu

Laboratory three-point bending experiments are carried out to evaluate the effect of various fluids on the tensile strength of granite. The granite specimens were tested under both dry and saturated conditions. The fluids used to saturate the granite inclu ...

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG2022

Failure mechanism of fine-grained soil-structure interface for energy piles

Lyesse Laloui, Elena Ravera

The response of the soil-structure interface can significantly affect the performance of any geotechnical structure. Thermal cycles are a new factor that influence the response to all structures that have an energy function in addition to the structural on ...

2022

Swelling and shrinkage of partially saturated gas shales: from laboratory tests to an effective stress framework

Jinwoo Kim

Gas shale swelling during hydraulic stimulation is one of the major challenges in unconventional gas development. It is hypothesized that the large volumetric strain upon water imbibition is a consequence of dramatic changes in capillary pressure and disjo ...

EPFL2022

Above- and below-ground responses to experimental climate forcing in two forb species from montane wooded pastures in Switzerland

Alexandre Buttler, Konstantin Svetlozarov Gavazov

Mountain ecosystems are particularly threatened by ongoing climate change and the species composition of high elevation grasslands is already changing. An open research question is how these ecosystems will adapt to changes in their key environmental const ...

WILEY2022