Publications associées à Geomechanical modelling of a natural slope affected by a multiple slip surface failure mechanism

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

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

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

Insights from an extensive triaxial testing campaign on a shale for comparative site characterization of a deep geological repository

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Eleonora Crisci

Several boreholes were drilled for site comparison of a deep geological repository (DGR) in Northern Switzerland. The main target of the exploration program was the >100m thick Opalinus Clay, the designated host rock encountered at approximately 450 to 100 ...

Elsevier2024

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

A fully-coupled highly-parallelized geomechanical simulator for assessing induced seismicity

Jean-François Molinari, Guillaume Anciaux, Nicolas Richart, Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Emil Gallyamov

Induced seismicity caused by anthropogenic modification of the subsurface effective stress state has been observed in a number of industrial applications -- from hydrocarbon extraction (e.g., Groningen [1]), drilling waste-water disposal (e.g., [2]) to the ...

2023

Modeling the mechanics and rheology of porous and granular media: an elastoplastic continuum approach

Lars Kristoffer Uhlen Blatny

The complex mechanics of porous and granular media play a significant role in various industrial processes and natural phenomena. As an example, understanding the mechanics of how failure occurs, localizes and propagates in porous brittle solids under vari ...

EPFL2023

Mechanics, Modeling, and Upscaling of Biocemented Soils: A Review of Breakthroughs and Challenges

Lyesse Laloui, Dimitrios Terzis, Ray Harran

Biogeotechnical research has inspired revolutionary ideas to claim the status of a distinctive branch of geotechnical engineering. Most notably, underground carbonate mineralization, most commonly referred to as microbially induced carbonate precipitation ...

ASCE-AMER SOC CIVIL ENGINEERS2023

Microscopic Digital Image Correlation Analysis of Strain Distributions in Stainless Steel 316L Induced by Multiaxial Cyclic Loading

Elif Cansu Kursun

Fatigue damage in materials results in localized strain at the microstructural level. In many engineering components of the cooling circuits of nuclear power plants, where austenitic steels are used, the material experiences multiaxial cyclic loading, eith ...

EPFL2023

Three-dimensional fluid-driven frictional ruptures: theory and applications

Alexis Alejandro Sáez Uribe

Fluid-driven frictional ruptures are important in a broad range of subsurface engineering technologies and natural earthquake-related phenomena. Some examples of subsurface operations where borehole fluid injections can induce frictional slip are deep geot ...

EPFL2023

A Depth-Averaged Material Point Method for Shallow Landslides: Applications to Snow Slab Avalanche Release

Bertil Trottet, Johan Alexandre Philippe Gaume, Denis Aloyse Joseph Steffen, Lars Kristoffer Uhlen Blatny, Louis Marie Cédric Guillet

Shallow landslides pose a significant threat to people and infrastructure. Despite significant progress in the understanding of such phenomena, the evaluation of the size of the landslide release zone, a crucial input for risk assessment, still remains a c ...

AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION2023

Single-Well Pore Pressure Preconditioning for Enhanced Geothermal System Stimulation

Marie Estelle Solange Violay, Barnaby Padraig Fryer, Mathias Alexandre David Lebihain

The stress state is an important parameter in terms of both earthquake nucleation and rupture. Here, a new stimulation technique is proposed for Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGSs), which have previously been burdened with a number of high-profile incidence ...

2023

Data-driven 1D wave propagation for site response analysis

Jean-François Molinari, Sacha Zenon Wattel, Antonio Joaquin Garcia Suarez

Prediction of ground motion triggered by earthquakes is a prime concern for both the seismology community and geotechnical earthquake engineering one. The subfield occupied with such a problem is termed site response analysis (SRA), its one-dimensional fla ...

WILEY2023

Geotechnical Engineering in the Digital and Technological Innovation Era

The book collects the keynote contributions and the papers presented at the “8th Italian Conference of Researchers in Geotechnical Engineering 2023, CNRIG’23”. The conference was held on July 5–7, 2023, at the University of Palermo (Italy), and it was orga ...

Springer2023

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

Approximate analytical solutions for assessing the effects of unsaturated flow on seawater extent in thin unconfined coastal aquifers

David Andrew Barry, Zhaoyang Luo

This study develops approximate analytical solutions for seawater extent in unconfined coastal aquifers considering unsaturated flow, and assuming steady-state, sharp-interface conditions, for both constant flux (flux-controlled aquifers) and constant head ...

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

Dynamic Effective Porosity Explains Laboratory Experiments on Watertable Fluctuations in Coastal Unconfined Aquifers

David Andrew Barry, Zhaoyang Luo

Watertable fluctuations are a characteristic feature of coastal unconfined aquifers. They interact with the vadose zone creating a dynamic effective porosity, for which a new (empirical) expression is proposed based on a dimensionless parameter related to ...

2023

Investigation of the effect of mineral dissolution on the geomechanical behaviour of geomaterials

Taeheon Kim

Geotechnical engineering scenarios engaged in internal erosion or mineral dissolution were found worldwide, from CO2 sequestration projects to internal erosion of earth dams. Materials subjected to loss of solid phase from their internal fabric vary from s ...

EPFL2022

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

Inception of Regular Valley Spacing in Fluvial Landscapes: A Linear Stability Analysis

Shashank Kumar Anand, Sara Bonetti

Incipient valley formation in mountainous landscapes is often associated with their presence at a regular spacing under diverse hydroclimatic forcings. Here we provide a formal linear stability theory for a landscape evolution model (LEM) representing the ...

2022

Effective stress for unsaturated active clays and in-situ effective stress estimation methodology

Angelica Tuttolomondo

The complexity of the mechanics of active clays and, more generally, of geomaterials with clay minerals, under saturated and unsaturated conditions, still provides relevant scientific challenges today. Equally relevant challenges are the understanding of t ...

EPFL2021