ENAC Seminar Series by Dr. Fabian Barras
Event details
| Date | 15.05.2023 |
| Hour | 13:30 › 14:30 |
| Speaker | Dr. Fabian Barras |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
13:30-14:30 - Dr. Fabian Barras
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oslo
Slip sliding away: the onset of catastrophic failures in geomaterials
Earthquakes, glacier instabilities and collapses, snow slab avalanches, land and rock slides; many of the various kinds of unpredictable natural disasters are preceded by the propagation of localized slip surfaces through geomaterials. In a context of global climate change, there is an increasing need for engineers and policy makers to assess the risks of geomaterial failures posed by the rapid transformation of alpine and polar environments. The difficulty of predicting and anticipating these catastrophic events is threefold. First, the propagation of the rupture that precedes sliding is often fast and can cross regions of the material that are not a priori prone to failure. Second, the loss of material strength along the created slip surface arises from micro-mechanical processes within narrow bands of intense shear strains. Third, the micro-mechanical response of geomaterials is characterized by the interplay of a solid matrix, which can either be continuous, fractured, or granular, and fluids that fill the pore space. This lecture will present recent experimental and numerical efforts to shine light on the coupled solid and fluid mechanics controlling failure at the pore scale of geomaterials and to bridge them to the structural scale where the slip surface propagates.
Short bio:
Dr. Fabian Barras is a civil engineer who graduated from EPFL (M.Sc. in 2013, Ph.D. in 2018). During his doctoral thesis, he developed and implemented numerical models to simulate the dynamic propagation of fractures in brittle materials. Recipient of a SNSF Early PostDoc Mobility fellowship, he joined the Njord Centre at the University of Oslo in 2019, where he is working at the interface between geologists and physicists of porous media on the catastrophic propagation of shear failures in geomaterials. As a participant of the ERC project BREAK, he is currently investigating the impact of fluid at the pore scale during these failure processes through the synergistic development of computational models and synchrotron X-ray microtomography.
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oslo
Slip sliding away: the onset of catastrophic failures in geomaterials
Earthquakes, glacier instabilities and collapses, snow slab avalanches, land and rock slides; many of the various kinds of unpredictable natural disasters are preceded by the propagation of localized slip surfaces through geomaterials. In a context of global climate change, there is an increasing need for engineers and policy makers to assess the risks of geomaterial failures posed by the rapid transformation of alpine and polar environments. The difficulty of predicting and anticipating these catastrophic events is threefold. First, the propagation of the rupture that precedes sliding is often fast and can cross regions of the material that are not a priori prone to failure. Second, the loss of material strength along the created slip surface arises from micro-mechanical processes within narrow bands of intense shear strains. Third, the micro-mechanical response of geomaterials is characterized by the interplay of a solid matrix, which can either be continuous, fractured, or granular, and fluids that fill the pore space. This lecture will present recent experimental and numerical efforts to shine light on the coupled solid and fluid mechanics controlling failure at the pore scale of geomaterials and to bridge them to the structural scale where the slip surface propagates.
Short bio:
Dr. Fabian Barras is a civil engineer who graduated from EPFL (M.Sc. in 2013, Ph.D. in 2018). During his doctoral thesis, he developed and implemented numerical models to simulate the dynamic propagation of fractures in brittle materials. Recipient of a SNSF Early PostDoc Mobility fellowship, he joined the Njord Centre at the University of Oslo in 2019, where he is working at the interface between geologists and physicists of porous media on the catastrophic propagation of shear failures in geomaterials. As a participant of the ERC project BREAK, he is currently investigating the impact of fluid at the pore scale during these failure processes through the synergistic development of computational models and synchrotron X-ray microtomography.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
- This event is internal
Organizer
- ENAC
Contact
- Sarah Feller & Clivia Waldvogel