2 PhD positions are available in the Geotechnics Section of the Dept. Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London.  The positions are part of the MatheGram ITN funded by Horizon 2020. The work will involve advancing understanding of the effects of temperature on soil behaviour.  The first PhD will be an experimental analysis of thermal effects on micromechanics of packed granular beds and will be supervised by Dr. David Taborda (d.taborda@imperial.ac.uk).  The second PhD will consider DEM analysis of thermal effects on micromechanics of packed granular beds and will be supervised by Prof. Catherine O’Sullivan (cath.osullivan@imperial.ac.uk).

The Division of Soil and Rock Mechanics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, has a vacant doctoral student position. The doctoral student will mainly carry out research within the project “Remedial grouting of dams – development of design concepts for grout curtains in the rock foundation”. This research project was initiated because there is a need to investigate how to perform remedial grouting of both new and existing dams in Sweden.

Note that this position targets the intermediate two-year Licentiate degree, but that the university will aim to secure the remaining funding to possibly let the candidate to continue to a PhD degree. More information is available on the KTH website

The goal of this project is to investigate the multi-scale behaviour of clay rock, going from microscopic to macroscopic scale. The research will be based on multi-scale
approach and numerical method allowing to model microstructure media in a double-scale framework (FEMxFEM). The PhD position is available at iMMC (UCL) in collaboration with the 3SR Laboratory (P. Bésuelle, CNRS, UGA). A postdoc position with a similar subject is also available.

Applications should be submitted by emailing a CV together with the academic grades (detail of marks) to the supervisor Benoît Pardoen.

More information in the attached document (updated version)

A position of a professor in Structural Engineering with focus on structural safety and reliability is opened at the Division of Structural Engineering, Faculty of Engineering LTH, Lund University, Sweden.
 
To apply or for more information: website link 

A call is open to award one research grant to develop research activities within the I&D Project CEN-DynaGEO – Coupled Experimental and Numerical Approaches Toward Reliable Dynamic Characterization of Geomaterials, PTDC/EAM-GTC/29923/2017, funded by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT). The recipient is expected to conduct research in the field of Geomechanics at the University of Minho, University of Lisbon and BarcelonaTech.

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This thesis deals with the constitutive modeling of low permeability partially saturated geomaterials, in the framework of enhanced poromechanics. Partial saturation means in this context that the porous network is occupied at least by two different fluid phases, having their own wetting properties. The classical poromechanical model, based on Biot’s theory, will be therefore generalized in order to account for stress/strain localization, within the solid phase, and fluid fingering, within the fluid phases. Strain localization will be treated making use of strain gradient theory and plasticity whilst partial saturation following a phase-field modeling approach to multi-phase fluid flow. To this aim, on the one hand, a fully coupled gradient constitutive law of the porous skeleton and the saturating (mixture of) fluid(s) will be assumed, which means that the free energy of the overall continuum will be a function not only of strain and mass concentrations of the fluid components, but also of their gradients. On the other hand, irreversible deformations of the solid skeleton will be modeled adopting a suitable plasticity model. This approach stems from previous results published by the
coordinator of the project [1-2] and can be partly retrieved in a line of research pursued by Collin and Kotronis, see e.g. [3-4], for what concerns the gradient approach to (un)saturated poromechanics.

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