How to join Aussois by train – ALERT Meeting 2024

Dear colleagues,

We are getting close to the start of the ALERT Workshop. A few details about your journey to Aussois:

As last year, the railroad line between Saint Jean de Maurienne and Modane is closed due to a rock slope instabillity. This is why there is no TGV between Paris and Modane.

You can get to Modane by taking a train between Chambéry and Saint Jean de Maurienne and then a bus to Modane. 

When you arrive in Modane by bus, there are cabs to call:
– Taxi Haute Maurienne: +33 4.79.20.51.57 
– Lionnel transport: +33 6.09.68.39.91 
– Gros : +33 6.60.38.01.23 
– Mont Taxi: +33 6.60.47.03.06 
– Alpes Taxi: +33 6.31.55.82.71

As in previous years, we have organized a direct bus service between Saint Jean de Maurienne (at the bus station) and Aussois on Sunday September 29. It will leave Saint Jean at 16h. Another bus is planned at 19h40.

See you soon in Aussois,
Frédéric COLLIN.

How to join Aussois by train – ALERT Meeting 2024

Dear colleagues,

We are getting close to the start of the ALERT Workshop. A few details about your journey to Aussois:

As last year, the railroad line between Saint Jean de Maurienne and Modane is closed due to a rock slope instabillity. This is why there is no TGV between Paris and Modane.

You can get to Modane by taking a train between Chambéry and Saint Jean de Maurienne and then a bus to Modane.

When you arrive in Modane by bus, there are cabs to call:
– Taxi Haute Maurienne: +33 4.79.20.51.57 
– Lionnel transport: +33 6.09.68.39.91 
– Gros : +33 6.60.38.01.23 
– Mont Taxi: +33 6.60.47.03.06 
– Alpes Taxi: +33 6.31.55.82.71

As in previous years, we have organized a direct bus service between Saint Jean de Maurienne (at the bus station) and Aussois on Sunday September 29. It will leave Saint Jean at 4pm. Another bus is planned for a later date, and you’ll be receiving information soon.

See you soon in Aussois,
Frédéric COLLIN.

LAST REMINDER – Registration for the ALERT Workshop and School 2024 – Deadline 1 Sept.

Dear ALERT community,

This is the last reminder that the registration for the ALERT Geomaterials Workshop and School 2024 is open! The preliminary programme of the Doctoral School and Workshop is available here.

Please note that the deadline for registration is SEPTEMBER 1st! It won’t be extended so make sure to register!

In the continuity of last year edition, a remote access to the doctoral school is proposed at the same price as the on-site option. However, this remote option only gives access to the passive attending of the presentations, and no questions could be asked.

This year, the ALERT Bureau has once again decided to offer one day of accomodation to:

  • all PhD students attending the doctoral school and belonging to an ALERT member institution (in a double room only);
  • all retired researchers attending the workshop.

Please read the hints in the registration form! After filling the form and pressing the button “Register”, a window will open to prompt you to save the invoice as a .pdf file. Please save it for your records! You will also get an email with the registration data afterwards. If you are an ALERT member, the corresponding representative of your ALERT institution will receive the registration data too.

Click here to register for the ALERT Workshop and School 2024.

The accommodation in Aussois will be processed in the order of the registrations (see the hints in the registration form). Please note that the number of rooms in the CNRS “Centre Paul Langevin” is limited.
See also hints on how to get to Aussois.

If you need to modify or cancel your registration, please send an email to director@alertgeomaterials.eu, mentioning your invoice number, at least one week before the meeting. Individuals who fail to honor their registration will be required to pay a fee to the hotel covering the cost of both the room reservation and the food services.

Looking forward to meeting you in Aussois!

REMINDER – Registration for the ALERT Workshop and School 2024 is OPEN!

Dear ALERT community,

We would like to remind you that the registration for the ALERT Geomaterials Workshop and School 2024 is open! The preliminary programme of the Doctoral School is available here, the programme of the Workshop should be posted soon.

Please note that the deadline for registration is SEPTEMBER 1st! It won’t be extended so make sure to register!

In the continuity of last year edition, a remote access to the doctoral school is proposed at the same price as the on-site option. However, this remote option only gives access to the passive attending of the presentations, and no questions could be asked.

This year, the ALERT Bureau has once again decided to offer one day of accomodation to:

  • all PhD students attending the doctoral school and belonging to an ALERT member institution (in a double room only);
  • all retired researchers attending the workshop.

Please read the hints in the registration form! After filling the form and pressing the button “Register”, a window will open to prompt you to save the invoice as a .pdf file. Please save it for your records! You will also get an email with the registration data afterwards. If you are an ALERT member, the corresponding representative of your ALERT institution will receive the registration data too.

Click here to register for the ALERT Workshop and School 2024.

The accommodation in Aussois will be processed in the order of the registrations (see the hints in the registration form). Please note that the number of rooms in the CNRS “Centre Paul Langevin” is limited.
See also hints on how to get to Aussois.

If you need to modify or cancel your registration, please send an email to director@alertgeomaterials.eu, mentioning your invoice number, at least one week before the meeting. Individuals who fail to honor their registration will be required to pay a fee to the hotel covering the cost of both the room reservation and the food services.

Looking forward to meeting you in Aussois!

Registration for the ALERT Workshop and School 2024 is OPEN!

Dear ALERT community,

I am pleased to inform you that the registration for the ALERT Geomaterials Workshop and School 2024 is now open! The preliminary programme of the Doctoral School is available here, the programme of the Workshop should be posted soon.

In the continuity of last year edition, a remote access to the doctoral school is proposed at the same price as the on-site option. However, this remote option only gives access to the passive attending of the presentations, and no questions could be asked.

This year, the ALERT Bureau has once again decided to offer one day of accomodation to:

  • all PhD students attending the doctoral school and belonging to an ALERT member institution (in a double room only);
  • all retired researchers attending the workshop.

Please read the hints in the registration form! After filling the form and pressing the button “Register”, a window will open to prompt you to save the invoice as a .pdf file. Please save it for your records! You will also get an email with the registration data afterwards. If you are an ALERT member, the corresponding representative of your ALERT institution will receive the registration data too.

Click here to register for the ALERT Workshop and School 2024.

The deadline for the registration is September 01st! The accommodation in Aussois will be processed in the order of the registrations (see the hints in the registration form). Please note that the number of rooms in the CNRS “Centre Paul Langevin” is limited.
See also hints on how to get to Aussois.

If you need to modify or cancel your registration, please send an email to director@alertgeomaterials.eu, mentioning your invoice number, at least one week before the meeting. Individuals who fail to honor their registration will be required to pay a fee to the hotel covering the cost of both the room reservation and the food services.

Looking forward to meeting you in Aussois!

ALERT Workshop 2024 – Call for abstracts

The ALERT Workshop 2024 should be held in Aussois from 30th September to 2nd October, 2024. Abstracts can now be submitted for the sessions. Please submit your abstracts by email directly to the coordinators using the Workshop abstract form (doc). If you wish to publish your presentation after the Workshop on the ALERT website, do not forget to agree by ticking the corresponding box in the abstract form.

Since time for the presentations is limited, only a part of the submitted abstracts can be chosen for the oral presentations. Therefore, we invite you to submit your abstract as soon as possible. The presentation can also be submitted as a poster. The abstracts of the posters will be published in a separate booklet (ISSN registered).

The deadline for the abstract submission is May 24, 2024. For any communication about your participation to the workshops, please contact the coordinators of the workshop sessions directly.

Here is a reminder of the workshop sessions that are opened to abstract, as well as a short description of each of them:

  • Session 1: “Emerging properties in geomaterials across the scales
    Organizers: Antoine Wautier, Farhang Radjai and Francesco Froiio.

    Geomaterials exhibit a wide range of complex behaviors that are of crucial interest for engineering scale applications or for mitigating natural risk hazards. Such behaviors are often accounted for through continuum mechanics concepts such as constitutive behavior, yield surfaces, hardening law, permeability, shear or compaction bands… Given the complexity of the macroscopic behavior of geomaterials, a current strategy is to use a multi-scale approach either in the lab or in the virtual lab (with DEM, molecular dynamics, X-ray tomography, SEM…), to identify sub-components with simpler behavior. However, in the change of scale, some properties are lost and some emerge.
    In the upscaling, we face the issue of emerging properties fundamentally different from those at lower scales. For instance, sand is usually modeled as non-deformable solids interacting through elastofrictionnal contact laws, but the internal friction angle (macroscale) does not corresponds to the contact friction (micro scale) but incorporate geometrical properties of the microstructure.
    On the contrary, the huge number of degrees of freedom that exist at the microscale is compressed into a much more limited number of macroscopic degrees of freedom. For instance, the displacements and the rotations of thousands of sand grains reduce to the strain tensor (and possibly its derivatives for enriched continuum mechanics) at the representative elementary volume scale. For the stress, the well-known Love-Weber formula, compress contact based information into a second order tensor.
    Working on the mico to macro link is probably the key for a wise use of phenomenological constitutive models (e.g. physics based justification of the parameters) and for an efficient use of multiscale strategies (e.g. FEMxDEM methods save probably too much microscale information).
    In addition, fundamental knowledge on the micro/macro link may prove crucial to anticipate future use of geomaterials subjected to unprecedented loading conditions. Among other conditions, we can think of temperature rises, thawing permafrost, chemical creation or dissolution of bonds, diffusion of pollution, cyclic loadings, recycling materials, varying degrees of saturation…


  • Session 2 (half-day): “Geomechanics at the submicron-scale
    Organizers: Katerina Ioannidou and Gilles Pijaudier-Cabot.

    Geomaterials usually exhibit complex mechanical behavior across several length and time scales. The submicron scale is relevant for understanding the microstructure and mechanical response of various geomaterials such as rocks, soils, sediments etc. Such materials are usually porous or granular and have been formed under different environmental conditions. At the submicron scale, nanoscale effects become significant. This includes phenomena such as surface roughness, intermolecular forces, pore structure, and distribution of defects which can influence the mechanical behavior of geomaterials. Moreover, processes such as fluid flow through nanopores, adsorption and desorption of fluids on mineral surfaces, and chemical reactions at mineral-fluid interfaces are important for the formation and aging of the microstructure of geological materials.
    This session aims to elucidate processes at the submicron scale either with numerical or experimental techniques that are important for geomechanics. 
    We invite contributions related to, but not limited to, the following topics:
    – Multiscale modeling and simulations of geomechanical processes
    – Fluid-solid interactions and nanopore-scale transport phenomena
    – Nanoindentation and atomic force microscopy (AFM) studies of geological materials
    – Microstructure characterization and imaging techniques at submicron scales
    – Fracture mechanics and crack propagation in geomaterials
    – Applications of submicron scale geomechanics in petroleum engineering, geotechnical engineering, environmental science, and materials science
    – Experimental techniques and instrumentation for studying geomechanics at small length scales
    – Advances in nanotechnology for geomechanical applications 



  • Session 3: “Continuum-based particle methods
    Organizers: Claudio Tamagnini, Lorenzo Sanavia, Matteo Ciantia and Antonia Larese.

    Until relatively recently, most of the mathematical formulations proposed for modeling multiphysics geomechanical problems relied on the assumption of linearized kinematics, i.e., the deformation of the soil mass is sufficiently small such that the current and the reference configurations of the soil body are virtually indistinguishable. However, geometric non-linearity may play an important role in some practical applications. A number of important failure and flow problems are indeed characterized by significant changes in the soil mass geometry and very high deformation levels. A non-exhaustive list of practical applications which require both mechanical and geometrical non-linear characterization of soil behavior include: the evaluation of pile bearing capacity of offshore platforms; the modeling of subsidence phenomena associated to hydrocarbon extraction and sinkhole formation; the study of the effects of pile driving; the interpretation of cone penetration tests under undrained or partially drained conditions; the modeling of slow slope deformations in presence of significant modifications of the slope geometry. The workshop intends to bring together researchers working in these fields to provide an overview of a number of relatively recent numerical methods (for example: MPM, PFEM, Peridynamics, SPH) capable of dealing with extreme deformations as well as non-linear material behavior of the soil mass, still remaining within the realm of continuum mechanics of porous granular materials.

ALERT Workshop & School 2024

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

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 !

GOING TO AUSSOIS BY TRAIN – LAST UPDATE – BUS LOCATION

Dear colleagues,

For those of you coming by train to Aussois this year, we have booked a transportation by bus between the Chambéry station and the Centre Paul-Langevin. Here are the final information:

  • Sunday 24/09 at 18:30, a bus will leave the station. There is space for 100 people so don’t worry, you’ll get on the bus!
  • Wednesday 27/09 at 18:45, a bus will arrive at the station. It should therefore leave the Centre Paul-Langevin at around 16:45. Of course, the bus will come back to the Centre with the people coming for the doctoral school.
  • Saturday 30/09 at 15:00, a bus will arrive at the station. It should therefore leave the Centre Paul-Langevin at around 13:00.

The bus will meet you at the “Gare Routière de Chambéry”, 250m from the Station “Challes-Les-Eaux”. You can see the plan below for more detailed instructions.

We hope this solution suits everyone, see you in Aussois!

Going to Aussois by train: Update

Dear colleagues,

For those of you coming by train to Aussois this year, we have booked a transportation by bus between the Chambéry station and the Centre Paul-Langevin. Here are the final information:

  • Sunday 24/09 at 18:30, a bus will leave the station. There is space for 100 people so don’t worry, you’ll get on the bus!
  • Wednesday 27/09 at 18:45, a bus will arrive at the station. It should therefore leave the Centre Paul-Langevin at around 16:45. Of course, the bus will come back to the Centre with the people coming for the doctoral school.
  • Saturday 30/09 at 15:00, a bus will arrive at the station. It should therefore leave the Centre Paul-Langevin at around 13:00.

We hope this solution suits everyone, see you in Aussois!