Seminar - Fernando Alonso-Marroquin - Ab-initio Computational Geomechanics

Monday 17 August 2009, 3.00 pm - 3.45 pm
Civil Engineering Lecture Theatre 2

The School of Civil Engineering is pleased to welcome Fernando Alonso-Marroquin, from the University of Queensland.

Abstract:
The mechanical behavior of geological materials has been largely investigated using constitutive modeling. On the other hand, the unprecedented advances in computer power of the last decades have made possible the investigation of geological materials at the grain scale. These models have provided valuable understanding of many micromechanical aspects of the complex material response of granular soils. In this talk I will present a method to investigate the material behavior of geological materials based on first principles. The conceptual framework of our method is the Morphological Dynamics, which is an efficient computational technique for high precision modeling of time evolving systems with complex morphologies. In Morphological Dynamic the system is regarded as a collection of objects (particles) and pair-wise interactions. The main components of the method are the representation of particle shape using Mathematical Morphology, the calculation of the interactions using efficient algorithms from Computational Geometry, and the resolution of the dynamics of the objects via Molecular Dynamics. I present applications of the method towards the non-empirical constitutive modeling, cyclic loading behavior of soils and quasistatic/dynamics of granular flow. I discuss also future directions towards for realistic description of interparticle forces and fluid-solid interaction using Lattice Boltzmann Models.