Creep failure of heterogeneous materials

Project description

"A collaboration with the Department of Applied Physics of Aalto University (Finland) on the analysis of creep failure of heterogeneous quasi-fragile materials (concrete, rocks,...) was launched at the end of 2019. The objective is a theoretical and experimental analysis, based on statistical physics concepts, of the rheology and failure of these materials under creep loading (constant stress), for which time-dependent (thermally activated) processes necessarily play a role. At the level of ISTerre, this project is in continuity with the work carried out in recent years on the damage and fracture of these same materials, but under monotonic ("athermal") loading. In this framework, a PhD student from Aalto, Tero Mäkinen, spent a month at ISTerre in January 2020, on Finnish credits, to carry out tests on concrete, combining measurements of deformation fields by image correlation, passive acoustic emission to detect microfracturing events, and damage fields by ultrasonic tomography. The present project aims to finance a stay of Tero Mäkinen in Grenoble this spring or early summer in order to finalize the analyses and write articles."