As part of COMPLAS XII (XII International Conference on Computational Plasticity. Fundamentals and Applications) to be held in Barcelona, Spain, 3-5 September 2013, Manuel Pastor and Frédéric Dufour are proposing a mini-symposium entitled
Numerical modelling of the failure and instabilities in geomechanics
While classical geotechnic is interested in the conditions under which failure occurs, engineers and scientists must predict in many occasions the post-failure behaviour of geomaterials, where these materials behave as fluids. This occurs in catastrophic landslides, debris flows, snow avalanches and submarine landslides, just to name a few.
So far, these problems have been addressed bu considering two successive steps, i.e., the initiation (or triggering) and the propagation.
Concerning the former, much effort has been devoted to study both localized and diffuse failure mechanisms, together with constitutive equations describing material behaviour at failure. Numerical techniques, such as finite elements, differences and volumes, together with meshless methods have been applied to describe the coupled soil structure-pore fluids problem.
Propagation problems, and, more generally, problems invilving fluidized geomaterials, have been studied within the framework of finite CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics). Many rheological models have been proposed to describe the behaviour of these fluidized soils.
What it is still missing is to understand and model the transitions between soild and fluidized soils or vice versa.
This session aims at bringing together scientists and engineers working at both areas. More specifically, we are interested on mathematical, constitutive/rheological and numerical models able to describe, in a consistant manner, the whole process.
In addition to modelling, physical experiments are most welcome to highlight these transition problems.
For detailed information on the conference see http://congress.cimne.com/complas2013/
In view of your acknowledged reputation and well known research activities in this area, we have the pleasure to invite you to deliver a lecture in our invited session. In case you are able to accept our invitation, we would kindly like to ask you to provide us with the title of your presentation. You find the guidelines concerning the abstract submission in http://congress.cimne.com/complas2013/
The actual deadline for the abstract submission is 17 December 2012 but please let us know at your earliest convenience if you plan to participate in this mini-symposium.
Manuel Pastor and Frédéric Dufour