The 2nd edition of the GéoMécanique newsletter is brought to you by Chao Yuan. It contains the latest news regarding research publications, conference visits and other activities of the staff and students from the GéoMécanique group of Laboratoire 3SR (Sols, Solides, Structures – Risques). If you have something you want to share, please don’t hesitate to contact us at: geomecanique.newsletter@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.
Miscellaneous
The 2nd “days of the lab” took place on the 4th & 5th of May in Autrans at Escandille and was organised by Maria Ghannoum, Tanguy Laurencin, Eleni Stavropoulou and Mireille De Sousa Pfister. Continuing the tradition of the “Journée des thèses”, the days of the lab is a 2-day event where the people who work in 3SR, have the opportunity to share their work with each other, discuss and socialise. The program included this year 9 PhD presentations (3 from each team), a poster session and a general assembly. Prof. Jöel Chevrier was invited to give a presentation on “Teaching with smartphones” and Alessandro Tengattini shared his PhD work with a 3′ video from Sydney. For the first time all the first year PhD students had the opportunity to present themselves through a video, now available on Youtube. (report by Eleni. )
Days of the Lab-2015
Publications
The paper “Internal erosion in granular media: direct numerical simulations and energy interpretation” by Luc Sibille, Franck Lominé, Philippe Poullain, Yacine Sail and Didier Marot has been published in Hydrological Processes.(full paper)
Research projects
Pierre Bésuelle’s experiment on id19 at the ESRF Synchrotron ran from 2015-04-22 to 2015-04-25. The objective was to study the mechanical behaviour of Callovo-Oxfordian clay-rock under relative humidity control. With help from Eddy, Simon, Jacques and Cino (as well as a number of visits from students) a good series of data were acquired at a pixel size of 0.65µm/pixel and reconstructed taking into account phase contrast. Each scan took 5m and generated 52GB of data!
The Cino Viggiani and Edward Andò’s three-year PhD AGIR project “Identification and tracking of grains undergoing progressive breakage under mechanical loading with image analysis of 3D+t tomographic images” was financed! Looking for candidates from Conputer Science and Image analysis with a taste for mechanics… please find proposal here.
Eddy and Vincent Richefeu’s ILL project “Experimental 3D probing of force chains in granular media undergoing deformation and breakage” for the in-situ measurement of stresses with neutrons on the SALSA instrument has been accepted.
Visits and conferences
Felix Darve, Bruno Chareyre and Chao Yuan participated in the Bilateral French-Italy Workshop on Going down to the microscale in multiphysics problems from seismic driven risks to petroleum geomechanics, held in Arpino, Italy, 4-6 May. The workshop is organised by the International Research Center on Mathematics and Mechanics of Complex Systems (M&MoCS) of the University of L’Aquila (Italy) in collaboration with the GDR MeGe, French Research Network in Multi-Physics and Multi-scale Couplings in Geo-Environmental Mechanics. Felix presented the keynote speech titled “Coulombian plastic friction, a world of bifurcations”. Bruno deliveded a presentation titled “Numerical models of porous media: the pore scale as a relevant (and tracktable) scale for multiphase couplings”. Chao talked about “Pore-scale modeling of two-phase flow in deformable porous media”.
People
Zeynep Karatza (in PhD student between Laboratoire 3SR and the University of Edinburgh) came to visit Cino Viggiani and Edward Andò for three days regarding her PhD on grain breakage.
Budi Zhao (3rd year PhD student who has been visiting us since the first of Feburary) is leaving the lab back to Hong Kong. While here he has developing tools for the analysis of x-ray images of grain breakage, as well as carrying out tests both in the Laboratoire 3SR x-ray scanner as well as the new one shared with SIMAP (and also met Zeynep — see above — for one day). The latest experiments allowed the imaging of the crushing since Caicos Ooid (diameter 400µm) at 1µm pixel size!
Budi and Erminio in the nano-tomograph