CAREER: An Integrated Dissipative Modeling Framework for the Long-Term Assessment of Geohazards

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award focuses on developing an integrated modeling approach –combining predictive modeling and simulations with optimal experimental selection— and monitoring protocols to predict and mitigate man-made and natural Geohazards. Examples of such Geohazards include landslides, debris and mudflows, sinkholes, over-pressurized underground zones, barriers and disposal sites, volcanoes, and earthquakes.

They are often devastating in casualties and infrastructure damage, and remain largely unpredictable. These Geohazards evolve on very long time-scales, of years or more, extend to field dimensions exceeding hundreds of meters, involve the response of Geomaterials prone to internal microstructural changes and transformations (like clays, shales, sandstones, mudstones, limestones), and display complex loading conditions, often involving heat and/or overpressures in the presence of chemically active fluids.

Through a combination of techniques from multiple disciplines, the project provides a major step towards demonstrating how interdisciplinary, energetic approaches may link processes operating at different scales. The aim is to develop a dissipative framework at the field scale using material information from the lower scales to assess the long-term potential of both man-made and natural Geohazards.

The research is complemented by innovative educational tools –such as an interactive 3D simulator—and an outreach program based on project-based curriculum development targeting a broad audience to make geotechnical engineering a gender-equal discipline.

The specific goal of the research is to understand and quantify the dominant physics governing the response of materials in the long-term conditions frequently encountered in Geohazards. This will be achieved by developing and testing an integrated framework combining experimental, theoretical and numerical developments, where information from material science analyses at the small scales is assimilated in a computationally-assisted constitutive framework through nested multi-scale numerical approaches, and validated through state-of-the-art experiments, before being upscaled to the field scale.

Thus the objectives of this project include: (i) bringing together concepts from disciplines including material science, soil and rock mechanics, solid and fluid mechanics, chemical engineering, thermodynamics, computational mechanics, and applied mathematics and physics, in order to identify and constrain the laws governing the long-term response of geomaterials; (ii) quantifying the energy budget of dissipative structures through multi-scale modeling, calibrated via testing in which both the microstructure and the average temperature are continuously monitored; (iii) predicting the response of selected Geohazards from microstructural data and continuous monitoring. The research project has the capability of offering unique and transformative knowledge on the response of Geomaterials in long-term, multi-physical loading, as well as deep insights into the mechanical and physical processes operating in Geohazards.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.