Publications related to A model for the water retention behavior of deformable soils including capillary hysteresis

Influence of fiber orientation on the tensile behavior of UHPFRC and reinforced UHPFRC under static and fatigue loadings

Ultra-high performance fiber reinforced cementitious composite (UHPFRC) is a modern class of cementitious building materials. Because of its superior mechanical properties and durability, it is increasingly used globally to rehabilitate, strengthen and mod ...

EPFL2024

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

Dataset for "Complexity of crack front geometry enhances toughness of brittle solids"

John Martin Kolinski, Chenzhuo Li, Xinyue Wei

This data package supports the publication 'Complexity of crack front geometry enhances toughness of brittle solids' by Xinyue Wei, Chenzhuo Li, Cían McCarthy, and John M. Kolinski Nature physics (2024) - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02435-x DOI: 1 ...

Zenodo2024

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

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

Dani Or, Sara Bonetti

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

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

Nanoindentation of embedded particles

Andreas Mortensen, Alejandra Inés Slagter, Joris Pierre Everaerts

We address the effect of elastic inhomogeneity on elastic modulus and hardness determinations made by depth-sensing indentations performed on individual particles embedded within a matrix of different elastic modulus. Finite element simulations and nanoind ...

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG2023

Shear strength and shear stiffness analysis of compacted Wyoming-type bentonite

Alessio Ferrari

Wyoming-type bentonite is one of the materials to be used as part of the Engineered Barrier System (EBS) in deep geological disposal facilities for the safe disposal of spent nuclear fuel.In the KBS-3 type repository, the canisters containing the spent fue ...

ELSEVIER2023

Bottlebrush Dielectric Elastomers with Improved Properties for Actuation

Yeerlan Adeli

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEA) are elastic capacitors composed of a pair of compliant electrodes and a soft dielectric elastomer film sandwiched in between. This kind of stretchable capacitors can be actuated when charged, can generate electricity fr ...

EPFL2023

Experimental investigation of rotational behavior of pseudo-ductile adhesive angle joints exhibiting variable strain rate

Thomas Keller, Abdolvahid Movahedirad, Ghazaleh Eslami

Pseudo-ductile behavior in composite structural frames can be achieved by enabling their beam-column joints to exhibit nonlinear structural response due to progressive damage, by using pseudo-ductile adhesives. This study investigates the static behavior o ...

2023

Equivalent Frame Models for FRP-Strengthened Masonry Buildings

Fibre-reinforced polymers (FRP) strengthening can be applied to decrease the seismic vulnerability of existing masonry buildings, both with regard to in-plane and out-of-plane failure mechanisms. Experimentally, the impact of strengthening solutions has be ...

Proceedings of the 2nd Croatian Conference on Earthquake Eng2023

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

Linking Soil Structure, Hydraulic Properties, and Organic Carbon Dynamics: A Holistic Framework to Study the Impact of Climate Change and Land Management

Sara Bonetti

Climate change and unsustainable land management practices have resulted in extensive soil degradation, including alteration of soil structure (i.e., aggregate and pore size distributions), loss of soil organic carbon, and reduction of water and nutrient h ...

2023

Multi-scale characterization and modeling of notched strength and translaminar fracture in hybrid thin-ply composites based on different carbon fiber grades

Guillaume Clément Broggi

Owing to their high specific stiffness and strength, Carbon Fiber Reinforced Composites (CFRP) are ideal candidates for the development of lightweight high-performance structures. Within this family, thin-ply composites allow for wider design freedom and p ...

EPFL2023

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

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

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

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

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