If you have something you want to share, please don’t hesitate to contact us at: geomecanique.newsletter|AT|3sr-grenoble.fr. Please feel free to forward the letter to colleagues and friends, and let them know that they can subscribe by themselves here. Enjoy.

We are proud of our new official group photo

People

Chao Yuan left the lab after five years of good research. He is now in Calgary as a Post-Doc in the group of Richard Wan, and continuously trying to make progresses in the modeling of multiphase problems – without freezing. Word of the PhD director B. Chareyre: “I miss him BADLY! Why did he leave?”.
Chao was managing this Newsletter since the first issue and for this alone he deserves many thanks. Ciao Chao.

Frédéric Donzé moved from the group and from Laboratoire 3SR to go next-door to ISTerre, taking Alexandra Tsopela with him for more géo-adventures.

Eleni Stavropoulou joined the Geomechanics Team as a Post-Doc working with Christophe Dano on the interface behaviour of soft rocks and grout applied to off-shore piles design.

Honors, Awards and Invitations

Bruno Chareyre will give a keynote lecture at the 2nd Yet Another Discrete Element Workshop. The workshop is organized at Irstea Aix en Provence by Jérôme Duriez, a former student and PDoc of our group. This workshop will be the second opportunity for the international Yade community to gather physically, following the first workshop in Grenoble.

Publications

Khaddour G., Riedel I., Andò E., Charrier P., Bésuelle P., Desrues J., Viggiani G., Salager S. (2018) – Grain scale characterization of water retention behavior of sand using x-ray CT. Acta Geotechnica, January 2018.

Jeanne published a paper in Géotechnique Letters Doreau-Malioche J., Combe G., Viggiani G., Toni J.B. (2018) – Shaft friction changes for cyclically loaded displacement pile: an x-ray investigation. Géotechnique Letters, accepted January 2018.

Visits and conferences

José Andrade and Shilpa Joy from Caltech visited us at the end of January to watch ants digging tunnels in granular media with x-ray tomography — more news soon!

Jelke Dijkstra was back from Chalmers University for a month visit which included another experiment at the ESRF synchrotron.

Dr. Zeynep Karatza from the University of Edinburgh visited us for a week in February to perform some experiments in the x-ray machine and gave a talk “A study of temporal and spatial evolution of deformation and breakage of dry granular materials using x-ray computed tomography and the discrete element method”.

Giacomo Russo from the University of Cassino gave a seminar entitled “Multi-scale analysis of chemo-hydro-mechanical response of fine grained treated soils”.

Honors, Awards and Invitations

Cino Viggiani has been elected as the new president of ALERT-Geomaterials (for the next three years).

Award for “one of the best papers published in Geosynthetics International in 2016″ for the following paper : J. Górniak, P. Villard and P. Delmas (2016). Coupled discrete and finite-element modelling of geosynthetic tubes filled with granular material, Geosynthetics International, 23, No. 5, 362-380.

Publications

The paper “All you need is shape: predicting shear banding in sand with LS-DEM” by Reid Kawamoto, Edward Andò, Gioacchino Viggiani and Jose Andrade was accepted for publication in JMPS.

The paper “Deformation and stresses upon drainage of an idealized granular material” by Chao Yuan, Bruno Chareyre and Felix Darve was accepted for publication in Acta Geotechnica. (Available online)

Visits and conferences

Bruno Chareyre will be co-promoting the PhD of Thomas Sweijen from Utrecht Hydrology, to be defended on Nov. 17th, at Utrecht University. Among other things, Thomas Sweijen contributed [ 1, 2, 3 ] to developing, validating, and disseminating numerical methods for solving coupled problems of multiphase flow in granular media. These advanced methods are available as part of Yade-dem.org.

Dorjan Dauti and Stefano Dal Pont attended the 5th International Workshop on Concrete Spalling in Borås, Sweden on October 12-13. Dorjan Dauti presented two papers:

• “Numerical benchmark of experiments on heated concrete” coauthored with S. Dal Pont, G. Sciume and M. Briffaut in the session of numerical modelling
• “First results on fast neutron tomography of heated concrete” coauthored with B. Weber, S. Dal Pont, A. Tengattini, N. Toropovs, M. Briffaut in the session of high temperature testing of concrete.

Dorjan Dauti also attended the Rilem Technical Committee meeting held in Borås on October 11. The subject dealt in this technical committee (TC 256) is focused on the spalling of concrete due to fire.

People

Zeynep successfully defended her PhD at the University of Edinburgh on the 4th of September with Florian Fusseis and Matthew Coop as assessors. The title of her thesis is “A study of temporal and spatial evolution of deformation and breakage of dry granular materials using x-ray computed tomography and the discrete element method” and it will be available online by the end of December. Well done Zeynep!

Alice Di Donna is the latest addition to our team. She has obtained a position of “Maitre de Conférences” (Assistant Professor) at Université Grenoble Alpes, effective since September 1st 2017. Alice obtained a Masters degree at UJF Grenoble and Politecnico di Torino back in 2009, then a PhD at EPFL, Switzerland, in 2014. After that, she performed a postdoc at the Politecnico di Torino and worked at the same time as a professional engineer at Teknema Progetti srl in Torino. Welcome Alice!

Alice Di Donna joins us! Welcome!

Floriana Anselmucci will soon start her PhD entitled “Roots-soil interactions: effects on soil micro-structure” under the supervision of Luc Sibille and Chloé Arson in Georgia Tech.

Related to the above, Evelyne Kolb (UPMC Paris) and Lionel Dupuy (University of Dundee) visited 3SR on the 25th of September to discuss about roots in soil.

Sabatino Cuomo (University of Salerno, Italy) is at 3SR since September 18. He will be with us until mid October — with funding from Labex Tec21 for visiting professors.

Jelke Dijkstra will visit 3SR 26-29th of September to discuss with Christophe Dano, Imane Salama and Eddy Andò about Imane’s ongoing PhD work, the current ESRF synchrotron experimental campaign and the next one too.

Publications

The paper “Numerical modeling of high aspect ratio flexible fibers in inertial flows” by D. Kunhappan, B. Harthong, B. Chareyre, G. Balarac, and P. J. J. Dumont has been accepted for publication in Physics of Fluids.

Max Wiebicke, Edward Andò, Ivo Herle, And Cino Viggiani’s paper “On the metrology of interparticle contacts in sand from x-ray tomography images” was accepted for publication in Measurement Science and Technology’s Special Issue entitled “Advanced X-Ray Tomography”.

Zeynep Karatza, Edward Andò, Stefanos-Aldo Papanicolopulos, Jin Y. Ooi and Cino Viggiani’s paper “Evolution of deformation and breakage in sand studied using x-ray tomography” was accepted for publication in Géotechnique.

Ilaria Soriano, Erdin Ibraim (University of Bristol), Edward Andò, Andrea Diambra (University of Bristol), Tanguy Laurencin, Paolo Moro and Cino Viggiani’s paper “3D fibre architecture of fibre-reinforced sand” was accepted for publication in Granular Matter.

Visits and conferences

Jacques Desrues and Pierre Bésuelle participated to the Clay Conference 2017 in Davos, Switzerland, from 24 to 27 September, to present both a work on a Callovo-Oxfordian clay rock multiscale experimental caracterisation of the deformation and material anisotropy, and also a double scale modeling by numerical homogeneisation (FEM2) of the clay rock using the enriched (more realistic) miscrostructure elaborated by Benoit Pardoen (post-doc in 3SR).

Orianne Jenck, Abdel Ali Dadda, Fabrice Emeriault and Cino Viggiani attended the 19th ICSMGE in Seoul, South Korea.

• Orianne Jenck presented a paper co-authored with D. Ricotier, D. Dias and L. Oxarango on “Multidisciplinary project-based learning for geotechnical and civil engineering students, to acquire fundamental concepts “, during a session organized by the TC306 on Geo-Education.
• Fabrice Emeriault presented a paper co-authored with O. Jenck and M. Houda on “Numerical back analysis of the behaviour of soft soil improved by rigid piles under cyclic loading” during a session organized by the TC211 “Ground improvement”.
• Cino gave an invited talk at the workshop organized by TC105 “Geomechanics from Micro to Macro” and was a invited panel member at the workshop “What should graduates be able to do and What and How to teach to”, organized by TC306 “Geo-Education”

Pierre Bésuelle, Edward Andò, and newcomers Nicolas Lenoir and Alice DiDonna went to the French national radioactive waste management agency’s (ANDRA) headquarters in Châtenay-Malabry (near Paris) for a meeting on the role of full-field imaging for mechanical testing on the Caollovo-Oxfordian clay-rock.

Alice Di Donna attended the 6th meeting of the Cost Action GABI-Geothermal Applications for Buildings and Infrastructure, which took place in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Visits and conferences

A number of people went to the International Workshop of Bifurcation and Degradation in Geomaterials (IWBDG2017) in Lemesos (Limassol) in Cyprus, starting with a keynote on localisation precursors from Jacques Desrues, and a large number of full-field experimental results on sand, sandstone, clayrocks, tuffeau…

PhD student Dorjan Dauti presented in the 7th International Conference on Coupled Problems in Science and Engineering held in Rhodes Island, Greece on 12-14 June. The title of the talk was: “A combined experimental and numerical approach for investigating concrete behavior at high temperature”. Coauthors in this work are: Stefano Dal Pont and Matthieu Briffaut from Laboratory 3SR, Benedikt Weber from Empa Laboratories in Switzerland and Giuseppe Sciume from University of Bordeaux.

A large cohort attended ICTMS 2017 (International Conference on Tomography and Material Structure) in Lund, Sweden:

• PhD Students: Thanos Papazoglou, Olumide Okubadejo, Maddi Etxegarai, Mohamad Yehya, Jeanne Doreau, Riccardo Rorato
• Others: Pascal Charrier, Alessandro Tengattini, Edward Andò, Cino Viggiani.

PG2017: The 8th International Conference on Micromechanics of Granular Media, or more popularly Powders and Grains, has been held in the beautiful city of Montpellier, South of France, on July 3-7, 2017. Our group delivered the following talks:

• “Toward multiscale modelings of grain-fluid systems”, Bruno Chareyre
• “Assessing contact forces in granular materials from experimental measurements of kinematics”, Mathias Tolomeo
• “Evolution of particle breakage studied using x-ray tomography and the discrete element method”, Zeynep Karatza
• “Experimental measurement of granular fabric and its evolution under shearing”, Max Wiebicke

and posters:

• “Wear of sharp aggregates in a rotating drum”, Ivan Deiros
• “Stochastic model for the micromechanics of jammed granular materials: experimental studies and numerical simulations”, Mathias Tolomeo
• “Coupled flow and deformations in granular systems beyond the pendular regime”, Chao Yuan
• “From continuum analytical description to discrete numerical modelling of localized fluidization in granular media”, Eduard Puig Montella
• “Effects of a large number of cycles on pile shaft resistance analyzed at thegrain scale using x-ray tomography”, Jeanne Doreau Malioche
• “A comparison between DEM and MPM for the modeling of unsteady flow”, Fabio Gracia
• “Experimental investigation of mode I fracture for brittle tube-shaped particles”, Marta Stasiak
• “Experimental and DEM analysis of the dissipation involved in the collision of a boulder with a substratum”, Bruna Garcia

Jeanne finally won the Best Poster Award among the 325 submissions.

Publications

Simulations of hydro-mechanical couplings in swelling granular polymers have been published in Powder Technology by T Sweijen, B Chareyre, SM Hassanizadeh and N Karadimitriou. The model implemented by T. Sweijen (Utrecht Hydrology group) is further extending previous developments by E. Catalano and C. Yuan. It is freely available as part of Yade DEM.

B. Chareyre commented on remarkable results reported by S. Khamseh, J.N. Roux and F. Chevoir in Physical Review E (2015). This discussion has been accepted by the editor and will appear soon in PRE.

Research projects

On March 27, took place the first meeting of the REGIC project (REnforcement par Géosynthétique Intelligent sur Cavités naturelles ou anthropiques) financed in the framework of the call for project ADEME (Investissement d’avenir, Route du futur) in which the 3SR laboratory is strongly involved. The partners of this project are INERIS, Texinov and 3SR (Fabrice Emeriault and Pascal Villard). There are an experimental part (small scale laboratory tests at INERIS and true scale experiments) and a numerical part supported by the 3SR (DEM modelling of the reinforcement of cohesive embankments by geosynthetics). A funding of 250 k€ has been allocated to the 3SR laboratory for the financial supports of a PHD, a post-doc and for the development of the numerical model . The PHD proposal is currently being finalized and will soon be released.

Visits and conferences

Our colleagues Jun Otani and Takashi Hiyama, both professors at the University of Kumamoto in Japan, came to visit us in March.

On February 9 and 10, 3SR hosted a mini workshop with two colleagues from Georgia Tech in the USA — David Frost and Chloé Arson.

In April 2017, Olumide Okubadejo and Cino Viggiani visited Georgia Tech, respectively for 2 and 4 weeks, in the framework of the GeoRamp project.

InterPore and the Darcy Center held a joint Workshop on “Advances in modeling flow and deformation in unsaturated porous media” at Utrecht University on the 20th and 21th of March. As one of the happy participants, Bruno Chareyre wants to thank the coordinator Ehsan Nikooee for the very interesting selection of contributors and effective organization.

People

GEOMECA (dominique daudon) team received Pablo BURGOS PhD student from IDIA (San Juan univerversity Argentina), with the GEORAMP-RISE mobility Program, for 3 months started from 4th April 2017. He works on the site effect and vulnerability to earthquakes of the Cochabamba bassin (Bolivia) .

Publications

The paper “Intensity and volumetric characterizations of hydraulically driven fractures by hydro-mechanical simulations” by E. Papachristos, L. Scholtès, FV. Donzé and B. Chareyre has been accepted in the International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136516091730076X).

The paper “Infrared thermography of rock fracture” by Y. SALAMI, C. DANO and P-Y. HICHER has been accepted for publication in Geotechnique Letters (http://dx.doi.org/10.1680/jgele.16.00131).

The paper “An experimental study on the influence of the coordination number on grain crushing” by Y. SALAMI, C. DANO and P-Y. HICHER has been accepted for publication in the European Journal of Environmental and Civil Engineering.

Visits and conferences

From January 16 through January 20, Grenoble hosted the 1st Winter school on multi scale approaches and multiphysics couplings in fluid and solid mechanics, organised by Labex Tec21 (https://www.tec21.fr/winter-school/). This doctoral school was attended by 40 students coming from all over the world — including our PhD students Dorjan Dauti, Mathias Tolomeo and Ilaria Soriano. Some of the lectures were given by members of the GéoMécanique team (Jacques Desrues, Bruno Chareyre and Cino Viggiani). A practical session on granular and porous materials was also organised by Gaël Combe and Eddy Andò — see https://www.tec21.fr/education/granular-and-porous-materials/

Our colleague Itai Einav, professor at the University of Sydney (http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/people/itai.einav.php) visited the lab in January. On January 18 he gave a very nice talk on “Rice-quakes in crunchy soft matter”.

Our colleague Francesco Silvestri, professor at the University of Napoli (https://www.docenti.unina.it/FRANCESCO.SILVESTRI), spent a full week at 3SR giving a course on “Soil Dynamics and Nonlinear Site Response Analysis” to the students of the masters program “Geomechanics, Civil Engineering and Risks”.

People

Our former master student Ilaria Soriano is back in Grenoble. Ilaria is doing a PhD in cotutelle between Heriot-Watt University and the Université Grenoble Alpes. Her PhD project deals with the micromechanics of weakly cemented sand. After one full year in Edinburgh, she’s now going to stay six months or so with us at 3SR.

You might remember (see Newsletter No. 11) that last July Giulia Guida, PhD student at University of Cusano (Rome), came to 3SR for a week of experiments, crushing LECA particles in oedometric compression using x-ray tomography. Giulia is now back in Grenoble to analyse the results she got — she will stay with us for about three months.

Timos Papachristos has defended on February 8, 2017. His PhD entitled “A 3D hydro-mechanical discrete element model for hydraulic fracturing in naturally fractured rock”, supervised by Frédéric Donzé and Luc Scholtès. The jury members were Farhang RADJAI (CNRS, MIT), Jean SULEM (ENPC ParisTech), Pierre BÉREST (École Polytechnique, MINES ParisTech), Chloé ARSON (Georgia Institute of Technology), Hamid POURPAK (TOTAL S.A), Bruno CHAREYRE (Université Grenoble Alpes), Frédéric DONZÉ (Université Grenoble Alpes) and Luc SCHOLTÈS (Université de Lorraine).

Honors, Awards and Invitations

Dorjan Dauti (thesis Tec21, supervised by S.Dal Pont) received the 1st prize award in the Empa PhD Symposium. Dorjan’s thesis is in collaboration with the EMPA of Zurich in Switzerland.

He said, “The event is called Empa PhD Symposium. It is an event organized once a year where PhD students from 30 labs at Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material Science and Technology) present their research work, either by a poster or an oral presentation. I attended with a poster and my poster was ranked 1st from the experts who are research scientists here at Empa. It is the first time that a participant from the Structural Engineer Lab (the lab which I belong here) wins an award in this symposium. The one handling the price in the photo is the director of Empa, Prof. Dr. Gian-Luca Bona…“

Publications

• Eduard Puig-Montellà, Marcella Toraldo, Bruno Chareyre and Luc Sibille published “Localized fluidization in granular materials: Theoretical and numerical study”. Physical Review E, 94(5), 052905, 2016.

https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.94.052905

• Igniciao Tejada, Luc Sibille and Bruno Chareyre published “Role of blockages in particle transport through homogeneous granular assemblies”. EPL (Europhysics Letters), 115(5), 54005, 2016.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1209/0295-5075/115/54005/meta

• Rodaina Aboul Hosn, Luc Sibille, L., Benahmed, N., & Chareyre, B. (2017). “Discrete numerical modeling of loose soil with spherical particles and interparticle rolling friction”. Granular Matter, 19(4), 2017.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10035-016-0687-0

• K Wang, WC Sun, S Salager, SH Na and G Khaddour. “Identifying material parameters for a micro-polar plasticity model via x-ray micro-computed tomographic (ct) images: lessons learned from the curve-fitting exercises”. International Journal for Multiscale Computational Engineering, 14(4), 2016).

http://www.dl.begellhouse.com/journals/61fd1b191cf7e96f,2b8c00292c2d9c29,7f3216382af87d2a.html

Visits and conferences

Cino and Eddy visited Yannis Dafalias, Manolis Vairaktaris, Alexandros Theocharis and colleagues in Athens at the end of November for the SOMEF project.

Publications

A wonderful book…
A Christmas gift for your supervisor…
For everybody that has some difficulties to sleep…

V. RICHEFEU and P. VILLARD (October 2016)
“Modeling Gravity Hazards from Rockfalls to Landslides”,
ISTE Press, Elvesier Ltd, 161 pp.

The paper “Axial behaviour of jacket piles for offshore wind turbines“, by R. Isorna, M. Blanc, L. Thorel, P. Kotronis, C. Dano & M. Philippe, has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Physical Modelling in Geotechnics (http://dx.doi.org/10.1680/jphmg.15.00044).

Research projects

The SOLCYP+ project has been awarded by the French research agency (ANR) in the frame of the research project call 2016 (AAP) dedicated to the marine renewable energy field. This project involves many industrial and academic partners (France Energies Marines, Ifsttar Paris & Nantes, ENPC, EDF, INNOSEA, LGCGE, FUGRO Geoconsulting, Dong Energy), with the support of Pays de la Loire and Normandie regions and STX company. 3SR (C. Dano, M. Boulon, F. Emeriault, JB. Toni) is the leader of Task 3 (with the support of EDF) about the interface shear behaviour of carbonate rocks and foundations of offshore structures. It includes a 1-year post-doctorate position for 3SR.

Visits and conferences

Dominique Daudon, Fabio Gracia and Bruna Garcia attended the Symposium on Monitoring, Physical and Numerical Modelling of Landslides and Rockslides (the GEO-RAMP project) on 14th of October, as well as a Doctoral School on MPM and DEM the 17th and 18th in Barcelona.

Bruno Chareyre and Eduard Puig Montella visited the Hydrology group at Utrecht University to discuss pore network modeling of multi-phase flow. Progress reports have been offered by Eduard and Thomas Sweijen. Plans for cross-validation of the Lattice-Boltzman (LBM) and the Volume Of Fluid (VOF) methods have been set.

Dominique Daudon will receive Stella MOREIRAS, Argentinian Geomorphologist of CONICET and Univ de CUYO of Mendoza Argentina, accompanied of her Doctoral Student Sebastian Junquera, working on co-seismic landslide risk mapping in Argentinian Andes, from Monday 21 November to 25 November 2017. The financial support is from COOPERA -CMIRA program of the Auvergen Rhone Alpes Region. A seminar will be presented by Sebastian Junquera.

Pierre Bésuelle gave a lecture at the European ALERT doctoral school in Aussois on October 6, 2016, on the “Experimental investigation of the emergence of strain localization in geomaterials”. The educational text of this lecture will be downloadable soon on the web site of ALERT.

People

Chao Yuan has been selected for a 1-year post-doc position in the Geomechanics group in the framework of the TECXXI project “PFV embedding LBM: a new numerical tool for micro-hydro-mechanical couplings”, starting November 2016.

Publications

The paper “Role of blockages in particle transport through homogeneous granular assemblies” by Ignacio G. Tejada, Luc Sibille and Bruno Chareyre as been recently accepted in Europhysics Letters (EPL), it follows, namely, the postdoc of Ignacio supported by the Labex TEC21.

Research projects

Bastien Exertier , from UGA L1 excellence student received a financial support for 1 month training in 3SRLAb, last June 2016. He realized a tazer on the last experiments conducted by a group of IUT students and the badaboom team . It explains the aims of the experiments conducted by Bruna Garcia for her PhD . It has been viewed first by the profs of physic received by 3SR for the annual GePhy meeting in July 2016. It will be presented for the “Science en fete” animation in October 2016. Let’ see and translate it in your mother language ! Video link

The Auvergne Rhone Alpes Region founded the IGLAS program for a collaboration on co-sismic gravitational movements between IANIGLA and UNCU of MEndoza (Argentina) and 3SR. Stella Moreiras will be again in the lab in November 2016 with her PhD student. The program is for 2 years, and everyone who like to work can apply to a funding by ARA region “cmira” for 3 to 6 months mobility in Mendoza to this research ; Please contact Dominique Daudon if interested.

Visits and conferences

Prof . Claudio Tamagnini, from University of Perugia in Italy, came to 3SR for three months from July to September 2016, in the frame of the Tec21’s long duration visitor fellowship. He supervises, in cotuelle with Université Grenoble Alpes, the PhD thesis of Carlos Pluà, on the development of a numerical strategy for enriched 2nd gradient continuum based on Iso-Geometric analysis finite element, applied to double scale model for partially saturated material.

Rodaina Aboul Hosn and Luc Sibille attended the 8th International Conference on Scour and Erosion (ICSE) last September in Oxford (UK). They were involved in the following presentations:

• “A Discrete Numerical Description of The Mechanical Response of Soils Subjected to Suffusion” by R. Aboul Hosn, L. Sibille, N. Benahmed (from IRSTEA), B. Chareyre
• “Numerical modeling of particle migration in granular soils” by I. G. Tejada (previously postdoc in 3SR/Labex TEC21, now in Technical University of Madrid), L. Sibille, B. Chareyre, E. Vincens (from Ecole Centrale Lyon)
• “Phenomenological interpretation of internal erosion in granular soils from a discrete fluid-solid numerical model” by L. Sibille, D. Marot & P. Poullain (both from Nantes University), F. Lominé (from INSA Rennes)
• “A possible characterization of suffusion susceptibility independent of the hydraulic loading history?” by A. Rochim, D. Marot, L. Sibille, V.T. Le (with our colleagues from Nantes University).

Dinner in an Indian restaurant during ICSE conference in Oxford.

Jelke Dijkstra from Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) started his short-term visiting scientist say in 3SR (thanks to the support from TEC21), to prepare to study creep with x-ray tomography both in 3SR and at the ESRF.

Alberto Giacomello from the University of Rome (La Sapienza) expert in microfluidics and MD simulations of water, came to visit Edward Andò and Bruno Chareyre, resulting in the submission of a proposal regarding “Film Flow in Granular systems” to the upcoming D50 neutron imaging instrument.

Alberto And Bruno

A word on DEM7 by Félix Darve:

“Congress DEM7 (the 7th International Conference on Discrete Element Methods) was held in Dalian ( China) during the first week of august 2016 with around 250 participants from 22 countries.

The three organisers were Profs Xikui Li ( Dalian Univ., China), Yuntian Feng ( Swansea Univ., U.K.) and Graham Mustoe ( Colorado Univ., U.S.A.). Three plenary lectures have been delivered successively by Felix Darve, Stefan Luding ( Twente Univ., Netherlands) and Xiaojing Zheng ( Xidian Univ., China). The title of my lecture was “DEM modelling in geomechanics, some recent breakthroughs”. The proceedings with extended papers will be published by “Springer Proceedings Phys.” in vol. 188 probably soon. The climate was not too hot, since Dalian is along the sea: people in shirts and shorts exactly as in Grenoble – even the writings on the shirts were all in english! Fortunately the refined chinese way of cooking is still making the difference … So convinced (!) that I am coming back in China (Tianjin Univ.) for one week at the end of October… “

People

M. Ritesh GUPTA, formerly student in the GERS Master, will start a PhD on November, 1st, under the supervision of C. Dano. The topic is the behaviour of piles subjected to combined (axial / lateral) cyclic loading. The PhD will be funded through the AGIR program.

Ms. Imane SALAMA will start her PhD on “Ageing of geomaterials adjacent to foundation elements”, under the supervision of C. Dano (UGA, 3SR) and J. Dijkstra (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden). The project is co-funded by Grenoble INP and Chalmers University of Technology.

Cyrille Couture started his PhD in the team from 1st October. The title of the PhD is “characterisation and modelling of the mechanical behaviour of porous rocks in true triaxial conditions: diffuse and localised deformation. He will be supervised by Pierre Bésuelle, Jacques Desrues and Stefano Dal Pont.

Publications

The paper “A FE2 modelling approach to hydromechanical coupling in cracking-induced localization problems“, by van den Eijnden A.P., Bésuelle P., Collin F., Chambon R., is available online on International Journal of Solids and Structures.

The paper “Micromechanical modelling of rainsplash erosion in unsaturated soils by Discrete Element Method“, by Sabatino Cuomo, Bruno Chareyre, Pietro d’Arista, Maria Della Sala, and Leonardo Cascini, appeared recently in CATENA. It follows, namely, the master thesis of Pietro, which was co-supervised by Sabatino and Bruno.

The paper “Modeling the strain localization around an underground gallery with a hydro-mechanical double scale model; effect of anisotropy“, by van den Eijnden A.P., Bésuelle P., Collin F., Chambon R., Desrues J. is available online on Computers and Geotechnics.

The paper “A new true triaxial cell for field measurements on rock specimens and its use in the characterization of strain localization on a Vosges sandstone during a plane strain compression test“, by Bésuelle P., Lanatà P. is available online on Geotechnical Testing Journal.

Research projects

The project “SegSed” has been selected by French ANR in the 2016 call (category “collaborative research”). The project focus on segregation in sediment transport. It is coordinated by Philippe Frey (IRSTEA Grenoble). B. Chareyre is a project participant in relation with coupled DEM-fluid simulations.

Visits and conferences

Giulia Guida, Francesca Casini, Alberto Guidi and Giulia Viggiani came to 3SR for a week of experiments, crushing LECA particles in oedometric compression using x-ray tomography, here are a few of us discussing the first results.

During the month of July, Simon Salager spent one week in the University of Salerno to continue the collaboration between our group and the one of Sabatino Cuomo. This visit was dedicated to work on the collapsible behavior of pyroclastic soil subjected to wetting. The stay and the travel was supported by a PHC Galileo. In the framework of the same project Mariagiovanna Moscariello will visit us in the autumn.

Miscellaneous

A rock-folding outcrop was found by Timos during summer vacation in Greece (with 3SR T-shirt promo).