Materials constitutive laws, including scale effects (PCI-3.2)

Problematic

To design an embankment dam, a good knowledge of the therm-hydro-mechanical properties of construction materials is essential. At a preliminary analysis stage, those properties need to be determined from simple physical parameters such as grain-size distribution, placement density and water content of materials. In the same way, back analysis of dam behaviour requires constitutive laws for the materials in place in order to correlate them to placement conditions during the dam construction. These constitutive laws must also be adapted to very coarse graded material (rockfill) that are used to construct dam shell. The presence of large size particles can impact the mechanical behaviour of materials. In the case of hydraulic behaviour, work carried out during Phase 1 of the Chair showed that the scale effect can simply be taken into account by  effective diameter and effective porosity parameters. It is at a smaller scale that problems are more complex. The objective of this project is to develop a general frame to model the thermo-hydro-mechanical behaviour of materials used in embankment dam construction.

Subprojects:

-Study of constitutive laws of mechanical behaviour (PhD3 and Postdoc2)

-Study of constitutive laws of hydraulic behaviour (MSc16)

-Study of constitutive laws of thermal behaviour (team)