Objective
Catastrophic landslides involve loose soil masses, mostly granular, containing clay and/or rock fill materials and most frequently occur after protracted rainfalls and floodings. They devastate or threaten European mountain regions, shorelines and mining deposits, involving millions of cubic meters of material, large areas of thousands of hectares and tens to hundreds of casualties. Although they are known and documented in geo-sciences, the mechanisms involved are yet relatively purely understood and modelled.
The proposed research focuses on application of advanced concepts of soil mechanics and new theoretical and experimental methodologies and models (mostly developed by the partners and their co-workers), which are tailored to the practical task at hand. Existing lab and field data will be critically re-evaluated, complementary data will be produced and comparative calculations will be made to arrive to recommendations for geotechnical monitoring and stabilisation.
The main objective of this research activity is to clarify the mechanisms of catastrophic landslides by: a) using concepts from constitutive-, material stability- and percolation theories, b) combining them with advanced numerical methods and codes, and c) to arrive to statements concerning post-failure behaviour, loads on shelters and hazard mitigation. The main scientific innovations of the proposed research refer to the transition of the flooded grain skeletons to suspension (such limit states involve indeed loss of material stability, percolation threshold and dynamic phase transitions). The grain skeleton is modelled by means of effective stresses as hypoplastic or visco-elastoplastic material with microstructure, whereas the pore-space is filled with water, obeying continuity and Darcy's law and may contain gas bubbles and ions. Modelling includes also aspects of deformation localisation, shear waves (in particular earthquakes) as triggering mechanisms, and rarefaction (density) waves to explain dramatic changes in skeleton fabric and soil-mass fluidisation.
The know-how gained from this research will be made available to geotechnical engineers, geo-scientists in general (geologists, hydrogeologists, geophysicists), administration (authorities for safety, environment, planing and maintenance) and related industries in particular to improve risk analyses and stabilisation procedures in high risk areas. The improved understanding of catastrophic landslides will benefit the EU-countries as improved mitigation of risk in numerous areas of high economic and intrinsic value (populated and touristic areas, Europe's natural environment).
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturegrains and oilseeds
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesgeologyseismology
- natural sciencesmathematicsapplied mathematicsnumerical analysis
- social scienceslaw
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
6020 INNSBRUCK
Austria