Abstract

Soils are diverse, ranging from more common materials such as clay, silt and sand to less familiar soils such as peat and methane hydrate soils. They are particulate, and this particular nature leads to response characteristics such as dilatancy, the importance of state, stress dependant strength and stiffness, non-linearity etc. Furthermore geomechanics problems require multiphysics analysis. For example, the material response is influenced by pore pressure and temperature. Hence geotechnical engineers often spend much of their time measuring the mechanical behavior of geomaterials and picking the “right” model to solve the problem. Such tasks are becoming more important nowadays as the use of numerical methods like the finite element method is standard engineering practice. The talk will cover the following multiphysics problems that the speaker has been involved with. (1) Long-term effect of tunneling in London clay addressing the importance of small strain stiffness and anisotropy, (2) Large scale submarine landslide highlighting the need of a large deformation model and (3) Wellbore simulation of methane production showing the development of a model for methane hydrate soil.