Despite an incredible amount of adversity in recent months – including a bit of smoke in Eiffel and, more importantly, the distinct lack of real-life croissants during our Friday “croissant” breaks – the GéoMéchanique group remains strong and productive. Find all the news within the 31st edition of our newsletter. Enjoy!
If you have something you want to share in the next newsletter, please do not hesitate to contact us at: geomecanique.newsletter@3sr-grenoble.fr .
People visiting, people visited
In February, we had a two-day visit from Matthew Coop from University College London (UK) to discuss and validate our design for a particle-particle friction testing apparatus — Matthew is the reference in this field. Our design is good, so now we build! Oh-well, “now” has become “soon”, given the fire in the Eiffel building plus the lockdown … 
In early March, Eddy and Cino visited Marius Milatz and colleagues at the Technical University of Hamburg — there is an ongoing collaborative project on the hydromechanics of unsaturated columns of sand under load studied with … x-ray tomography (surprise surprise!)
PhD graduates!
On March 5, Max Wiebicke successfully defended his PhD at the University of Dresden, Germany. Max PhD is entitled “Experimental analysis of the evolution of fabric in granular
soils upon monotonic loading and load reversals” and was jointly supervised by Ivo Herle in Dresden and by Eddy and Cino at 3SR.
On April 7, Ghassan Shahin successfully defended his PhD at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (USA). Ghassan’s PhD is entitled “Geomechanical modeling of inception and propagation of compaction bands in porous rocks” and was jointly supervised by Giuseppe Buscarnera in the USA and by Cino in Grenoble.
A look at some recent journal publications
Eddy and Cino coauthored the following paper, which was accepted for publication:
Mollon G., Quacquarelli A., Andò E., Viggiani G. (2020) – Can friction replace roughness in the numerical simulation of granular materials? Granular Matter, accepted February 2020.
Alessandro, Nicolas, Eddy, and Cino coauthored the following paper, which was accepted for publication:
Tengattini A., Lenoir N., Andò E., Giroud B., Atkins D., Beaucour J., Viggiani G. (2020) – NeXT-Grenoble, the Neutron and X-ray Tomograph in Grenoble. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A, accepted April 2020.
(please note that the final open access version is available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2020.163939)
Eleni, Eddy, Emmanuel, and Alessandro also published an article in Frontiers in Earth Science:
Stavropoulou Eleni, Andò Edward, Roubin Emmanuel, Lenoir Nicolas, Tengattini Alessandro, Briffaut Matthieu, Bésuelle Pierre (2020) Dynamics of Water Absorption in Callovo-Oxfordian Claystone Revealed With Multimodal X-Ray and Neutron Tomography, Frontiers in Earth Science, accepted February 2020.
Open Geomechanics is set to release a new article by Robert:
Caulk, R.A. (2020) Modeling acoustic emissions in heterogeneous rocks during tensile fracture with the Discrete Element Method. Open Geomechanics, accepted April 2020.