Ioannis Vardoulakis PhD Prize 2024 – Deadline Extension

The Bureau of ALERT Geomaterials has decided to fund the Ioannis Vardoulakis PhD Prize 2024. Since 2016, the PhD prize is entitled Ioannis Vardoulakis PhD Prize to commemorate Prof. Vardoulakis and his contributions to research and teaching in the field of Geomechanics.

The participation to the prize is open to all the PhD students with at least one official supervisor from one of the institutions belonging to ALERT, that have successfully defended their PhD thesis in 2023. The deadline for the applications is extended until 30th April, 2024.

The rulesagenda and further details are to be found on the ALERT website:
https://alertgeomaterials.eu/alert-phd-prize/

Multiphysical processes in granular media at the 2024 SES Annual Meeting

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that we will offer a session on Multiphysical processes in granular media at the 2024 Society of Engineering Science Annual Meeting, which will take place in Hangzhou (China), 20-23 Aug 2024.

We look forward to your contributions!

The description of this minisymposium is shown in the attachment, and the full session details can be found here: 2024 SES Annual Technical Meeting. Please consider submitting an abstract to our session. The deadline for abstract submission is Apr. 1st, 2024. We are looking forward to meeting you here in Hangzhou.

All the Best!
Teng Man and all the co-organizers  

Minisymposium details:
Granular materials, such as those arising in industry and geophysics, displays a variety of unique phenomena, such as evolving volume compaction/dilation, jamming transition, fluid solid interactions, localized shear-banding, grain breakages, flow and contaminant transport in pore spaces, shear thickening/thinning, and granular segregation. The varied behavior of granular materials at the macroscopic, continuum scale stems from the rich physics at the microstructural scale; however, understanding the underlying microscale mechanics and physics and the connections between the particle and continuum scales remain unresolved issues of current research. Recent decades witness significant progress having been made in promoting various advanced experimental techniques, generalizing the rheological behaviors of granular flows, understanding the jamming transition physics of granular systems, and proposing multiple numerical techniques to quantitatively represent the thermal, mechanical, and chemical behaviors of granular materials.

This mini-symposium aims to highlight current state-of-the-art research in the mechanics and physics of granular systems across different scales ranging from the particle level to the continuum level and with different physical phases. We encourage submissions of abstracts with experimental, theoretical, and computational focuses. Topics of interest include advanced experimental techniques (such as particle tracking velocimetry and photoelasticimetry), visco-elasto-plasticity of granular solids, rheology and segregation of granular mixtures, contaminant transport within granular-fluid systems, as well as modeling work related to discrete-particle modeling, statistical mechanics of granular media, homogenization approaches toward continuum modeling, classical and higher-order continuum theories, finite-element modeling, multi-scale approaches, parallel computing architecture, and machine learning methods.

More information on this pdf.

LAST CALL for 14th ALERT Olek Zienkiewicz course – 22-26 April 2024

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The 14th ALERT Olek Zienkiewicz course 2024 will be organized by INRAE from April 22nd to 26th in Aix-en-Provence, France.

The title of the school is: “Hydro-mechanical behavior of geomaterials for civil engineering structuresTheoretical models, simulations, lab testing and risk analysis

The content of the course will address the characterization and the modeling of the hydro-mechanical behavior of geomaterials from the microscale to the structure scale. You will find more details in the attached flyers both from scientific and practical point of view.

The school is free of registration fees and the lunches will be offered to participants. Please register BEFORE MARCH 15th accordingly: https://evento.renater.fr/survey/course-ed353-et-oz-c…-m1opux05

A web page with all the details is available at: https://recover.paca.hub.inrae.fr/zoom-sur2/oz-doctoral-course).

Registration is Open for the 2024 SPAM Workshop

https://www.spam-project.dev/workshops/2024

This workshop should be of interest to experimentalists interested in quantifying strain, especially in 3D+t. SPAM workshops are organised each year and aim at bringing support to our users while building up the community. During three days you will have the opportunity to bring your own data and analyse it with the spam core development team. This year the workshop will be held in Villar d’Arène in the French Alps. It is a remote destination in the mountains yet not that far from international airports and train stations. The price for participation will be about 500€ and includes a full pension for the three days of the workshop.

EMI 2024 IC Vienna – MS 11: Mechanics of Multiphase-Multiscale Granular and Particulate Systems

Dear Colleagues,

We are organizing a Mini-symposium (MS11 – Titled «  Mechanics of Multiphase-Multiscale Granular and Particulate Systems ») at the upcoming ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute – 2024 International Conference that will take place in Vienna on the premises of the TU Wien on September 11-13, 2024. 

All details of the EMI 2024 IC can be found on the following website: https://www.emi2024ic.com

It is our pleasure to invite you to submit your work and participate to this important event, you can find in the attached flyer all the details of our Mini-symposium (MS11).

Abstracts can be submitted on the website of the conference before March 30, 2024

https://www.emi2024ic.com/programme/abstract-submission/

Registration can be made here: https://www.emi2024ic.com/registration/

We would be grateful if you could distribute this announcement to anyone who might be interested.

Looking forward to meeting you in Vienna!

Best regards, Pierre-Yves, François and Mahdia

Fourth Pan-American Conference on Unsaturated Soils (PanAm UNSAT 2025)

The Fourth Pan-American Conference on Unsaturated Soils (PanAm UNSAT 2025) will be held June 22-25, 2025 in Ottawa, ON, Canada. The website is: www.panam-unsat2025.ca

The conference’s main theme is Unsaturated Soils for All Environments, and will include typical topics in unsaturated soils, but also aspires to include special topics on the role of unsaturated mechanics in cold regions geotechnique, the role of unsaturated soils in managing the impacts of climate change, as well as practical application of unsaturated soil theory in geohazards, mining, and other fields.

We are very pleased to have already secured speakers of note from academia and from consulting, including Del Fredlund, Daichao Sheng, and Mike O’Kane, who will speak on engineering decisions employing unsaturated soil mechanics, unsaturated soils in cold regions, and reflections on 30 years of application of unsaturated soil mechanics in the mining industry, respectively. Look for additional information on our speaker list as it is updated on our website, which will include presenters throughout the PanAm region and representing multiple topics in unsaturated soils.

Final papers will be published with Springer conference series collection (accessible through many libraries and indexed in Web of Science and other citation databases) and the proceedings will be available pre-conference. We are also excited to announce that after the conference, select papers will be invited for submission to a Special Issue of the Journal Geotechnical and Geological Engineering.

The Call for Abstracts is now OPEN. Details can be found on the Call for Abstracts page of the conference website. Authors are invited to identify one or more of the following topics with their submission. The deadline to submit abstracts to PanAm UNSAT 2025 is March 27, 2024.

Exploring Dynamic Properties of Earth and Planetary Materials Using Neutron and X-Ray Methods

Integration of beamline technologies and rock deformation experiments can facilitate the investigation of the feedback between evolving mechanical properties, deformation textures, and deformation mechanisms, leading to much more robust extrapolation of lab-based rheological models to Earth and other planets. The NSF-funded Research Coordination Network (RCN) “In Situ Studies of Rock Deformation” (ISRD) aims at developing novel methods that exploit the beamline capabilities, enabling the next generation of rock deformation experiments, wherein samples can be examined while they are deforming.  

The 4th ISRD-RCN workshop, hosted by the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL) and the University of Grenoble Alpes will take place in-person at ILL/ESRF campus on May 21-23, 2024. This workshop will focus on neutron and X-ray scattering and imaging as well as their applications in studying the dynamic properties of earth and planetary materials.

The list of speakers includes:

Damien Freitas (University of Manchester): “4D Synchrotron triaxial apparatus at TOMCAT”

Olga Stamati (ESRF): “SPAM: a software tool for studying volume deformations and correlations”

Robert Farla (DESY): “PETRA III and the bespoke large volume press”

Helen Lewis (Heriot-Watt University): “Neutron and X-ray studies of fluid flow in reservoirs”

Peter Moonen (University of Pau): “Geological H-storage, a multidisciplinary study”

Francois Renard (ESRF/University of Oslo) “Fluid flow in rocks in 4D: from images to processes”

Chelsea Neil (Los Alamos National Lab): “Porosity studies of shale gas recovery and H2 storage”

Hiroyuki Kagi (University of Tokyo): “High pressure geoscience enabled by PLANET”

Pierre Bésuelle, (UGA), “Failure prediction, strain localization from full field analyses”

Alessandro Tengattini, (UGA/ILL), “Geomechanical studies enabled by NeXT-Grenoble”

We expect additional presentations on measurement needs from participants and emerging techniques.

Participants will also visit ESRF and ILL to discuss with beamline scientists and other participants about potential beamline experiments. All participants will be partially supported to attend the workshop, the level of support will depend on fund availability.

Please mark your calendar. We will put up the workshop registration page shortly on the ISRD website (https://www.isrdrcn.org).

Alessandro Tengattini, Chair, ISRD-RCN NeXT Workshop Organizing Committee

Daniel Hussey, Co-Chair, ISRD-RCN NeXT Workshop Organizing Committee

Wenlu Zhu, Co-Chair, ISRD-RCN NeXT Workshop Organizing Committee

Abstract submission for ICBBG 2025

This is a friendly reminder on abstract submission to the Internation Conference on Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics (ICBBG2025), which is due March 15, 2024. Attached please find a flyer.

The conference seeks to present the state of the art in the field of Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics (BioGeotechnics), promote co-operation and exchange of information about the emerging field of bio-geotechnics; develop and promote improved modeling of bio-mediated and bio-inspired processes; translate fundamental bio-inspired knowledge into enabling technologies with future commercialization potential; and facilitate the adoption of bio-mediated and bio-inspired solutions into geotechnical engineering practice.

Abstract Submission Deadline: March 15, 2024

Submit an Abstract: https://icbbg2025.com/submissions/call-for-abstracts

Learn more: https://icbbg2025.com/

Contact us:  icbbg2025@gmail.com

14th ALERT Olek Zienkiewicz course – 22-26 April 2024

The 14th ALERT Olek Zienkiewicz course 2024 will be organized by INRAE from April 22nd to 26th in Aix-en-Provence, France.

The title of the school is: “Hydro-mechanical behavior of geomaterials for civil engineering structures: Theoretical models, simulations, lab testing and risk analysis

The content of the course will address the characterization and the modeling of the hydro-mechanical behavior of geomaterials from the microscale to the structure scale. You will find more details in the attached flyers both from scientific and practical point of view.

The school is free of registration fees and the lunches will be offered to participants. Please register as soon as possible here so that we can plan accordingly: https://evento.renater.fr/survey/course-ed353-et-oz-c…-m1opux05

A web page should be created very soon on the web page of the organizing research unit RECOVER (https://recover.paca.hub.inrae.fr/zoom-sur2/oz-doctoral-course).

ALERT Workshop & School 2024

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Dear ALERT members,
Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to announce to you the themes and dates of the ALERT Workshop and School 2024.

ALERT WORKSHOP 2024
Dates of the ALERT Workshop 2024: 30th September to 2nd October 2024

  • Session 1: “Emerging properties in geomaterials across the scales
    Organizers: Antoine Wautier, Farhang Radjai and Francesco Froiio.
  • Session 2 (half-day): “Geomechanics in the submicron-scale
    Organizers: Katerina Ioannidou and Gilles Pijaudier-Cabot.
  • Session 3: “Continuum-based particle methods
    Organizers: Claudio Tamagnini, Matteo Ciantia, Lorenzo Sanavia and Antonia Larese.

ALERT SCHOOL 2024
Dates of the ALERT School 2024: 3rd October to 5th October 2024

  • Numerical methods in geomechanics
    Organizers: Claudio Tamagnini, Lorenzo Sanavia and Manolo Pastor.

Hoping to see you in Aussois !