The title of the ALERT Doctoral School 2013 is Soil-structure interaction. It will take place in Aussois, October 3-5, 2013. The school organisers are Panagiotis Kotronis (EC Nantes), Claudio Tamagnini (University of Perugia) and Stephane Grange (UJF Grenoble).
At its meeting in Aussois, October 2012, the ALERT Board of Directors approved three submitted applications for the ALERT membership:
With this decision, the number of the member institutions of ALERT Geomaterials increased to 30!
The invited Special Lecture during the ALERT Workshop 2013 will be presented by Prof. Ronaldo Borja from Stanford University. The title of his talk is Triggering a shear band in heterogeneous porous media.
The book with lecture notes from the ALERT Doctoral School 2012 on Advanced experimental techniques in geomechanics, edited by G. Viggiani, S.A. Hall and E. Romero, is available for free download.
The pictures taken by the students for the photo competition during the ALERT Doctoral School 2012 are now available online. The competiton was initiated by Carlos Santamarina and its results were presented in a stimulating atmosphere by Eddy Ando. The subject of the competition was reserch motivation.
The ALERT PhD Prize 2012 was awarded to Thomas Blanc from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid for his PhD thesis entitled “The Runge-Kutta Taylor-SPH, A new improved model for soil dynamics problems” (abstract), and to Mohammad Monfared from École des Ponts – Paris Tech for his PhD thesis entitled “Temperature-damage-permeability coupling in clayey soils and rocks” (abstract). See more details and the winners from the previous years.
The annual meeting of ALERT Geomaterials in Aussois is over. A collection of impressions photographed by David Mašín can be found on his webpage. More news from the meeting will follow soon.
From the 17th to 21st September 2012 the Olek Zienkiewicz Course (ALERT Doctoral Summerschool) entitled Constitutive Modelling of Soils took place in Dresden. 42 participants from 15 countries were listening to the presentations of four lecturers – Professors David Muir Wood (Dundee), Claudio Tamagnini (Perugia), David Mašín (Prague), Ivo Herle (Dresden) – and working out computer exercises using the software Octave.
Please find here the link to the final program of the ALERT Workshop and Doctoral School 2012.
As already announced, the Special Lecture during the ALERT Workshop 2012 will be presented by Carlos Santamarina. The title of the lecture will be GEOPHYSICAL CHARACTERIZATION.
Abstract:
The behavior of granular materials, such as soils and fractured rocks, is determined by their discrete nature. Analogous to all other particulate materials, their properties depend on environmental parameters, such as confinement and fluid characteristics; furthermore, interparticle forces govern mechanical properties, interconnected porosity defines flow and affects diffusion characteristics, and multiphase conditions give rise to a wealth of coupled phenomena. Small-strain, electromagnetic and thermal measurements provide complementary soil and fractured rock information. Geophysical methods combine the science of granular materials, the physics of waves and thermal phenomena, signal processing and inverse problem solving to create exceptional tools for characterization and process monitoring in the laboratory and in the field. Engineering applications in site investigation, foundation engineering, geoenvironmental process monitoring, and energy-related tasks demonstrate the power and versatility of these geophysical tools.