Granular media constitute the most abundant form of solid matter on Earth and other astronomical objects. When external forces are applied to granular media, the forces are transmitted in the media through a network of contacts—force chains. Understanding the temporal evolution and spatial structure of these force chains constitutes a fundamental goal of granular mechanics. For decades, our...
To integrate the complex interplay of mechanics of gaseous solvent injection, reservoir deformation, and near-wellbore formation collapse, we designed and manufactured a highly-instrumented scaled laboratory experiment, capable of simulating and monitoring the cyclic CO2 injection process in heavy oil reservoirs at in-situ conditions. In this work, we present the application of a 2-meter beam...
Efficiency and robustness of the linear solver is a fundamental need in multiphase flow models in porous media, as sequences of large ill-conditioned systems of linearized equations have to be repeatedly solved during fully implicit simulations. This is a computationally intensive task, whose performance is usually dominated by the boosting capabilities of the preconditioner accelerating a...
The intensity and damage potential of earthquakes are linked to the speed at which rupture propagates along sliding crustal faults. Most earthquakes are sub-Rayleigh, with ruptures that are slower than the surface Rayleigh waves. In supershear earthquakes, rupture is faster than the shear waves, leading to sharp pressure concentrations and larger intensities compared with the more common...
Subsurface geological formations can be utilized to safely store large-scale (TWh) renewable energy in the form of green gases such as hydrogen. Successful implementation of this technology involves estimating feasible storage sites, including rigorous mechanical safety analyses. Geological formations are often highly heterogeneous and entail complex nonlinear inelastic rock deformation...
The time-dependent behaviour of geomaterials is of concern in many geotechnical engineering projects. These include the analyses of long-term settlement and creep-induced failure of infrastructure founded on soft soils, stability of natural and excavated soil slopes, strain-rate-dependent response of earth-structures subjected to dynamic loads, the construction of tunnels in squeezing grounds,...
Wood, as natural adsorbent and significant building material, features complex biopolymer composition and hierarchical porous structure, endowing it with distinguished sorption properties accompanied by sorption-induced deformation. In former studies, sorption, deformation and sorption-deformation interactions have been studied for single-scale materials, but not for materials where micropores...
Poroelasticity inspects the interaction among fluid flow and elastic deformations within a porous material. In several applications in the context of environmental sustainability, such as geothermal energy production and CO2 sequestration, temperature plays an important role in the description of the physical phenomena. Therefore, in order to correctly describe these geological processes, the...
The integration of poromechanical experiments under X-ray computed tomography with numerical simulations could improve the modeling of intrinsic attenuation of seismic waves by fluid pressure diffusion (FPD). This could lead to improvements in the monitoring of carbon dioxide storage sites where the sensitivity of the attenuation of seismic waves by FPD to the saturation and spatial...
Salt caverns provide promising storage capacities for safe cyclic storage of hydrogen. With a few caverns worldwide in operation for (monotone) hydrogen storage as feedstock to chemical factories, scaling up their utilization for energy transition requires quantification of the rock salt mechanical behavior under cyclic loading. Not only the mechanics of the rock salt specimen, but also the...
