Enrique Romero (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech, Spain) and Jean-Michel Pereira (Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, France) are organizing a mini-symposium on “Coupled processes in geomechanics. Bridging theory and experiments” (MS16) at the 5th Biot Conference on Poromechanics to be held in Vienna, Austria, July 10-12, 2013.

This mini-symposium is intended to be an exchange forum for researchers working on either experimental or theoretical aspects related to multiphysics couplings in geomaterials (soils, rocks, cementitious materials). See below for a more detailed scope of this mini-symposium. If you’re interested by this topic, please consider contributing to this mini-symposium by uploading an abstract, before November 15, 2012, on this page: http://biot2013.conf.tuwien.ac.at/programme/abstract-submission.html

Brief description of aim of mini-symposium

The extension of geotechnical engineering applications and the research interest in multiphysics processes are becoming wider in recent years, mainly within the context of geoenvironmental, energy production, and geosciences areas. Topics such as crystal growth in geomechanics, fast sliding processes along faults and landslide surfaces, biological soil improvement, geothermal energy exploitation, waste confinement (at surface or at great depths using engineered barriers or host geological formations), soil pollution and remediation, CO2 storage, oil field subsidence phenomena and assessment of seals in hydrocarbon production, to cite but a few of them, are increasingly coming into prominence. These new fields of application require the incorporation of relevant and coupled thermo-hydro-chemo-bio-electro-mechanical phenomena, the evolution of which must be examined over important periods of time, and the introduction of new constitutive variables for a deeper understanding of the behaviour of geomaterials. Important efforts have been devoted in the last years to advance in the theoretical formulations, numerical analyses, constitutive modeling and laboratory techniques, as well as in the detailed examination of well documented field cases.