Dr Mohammad Rezania
Modelling the combined cyclic and creep behaviour of natural soils
Time-dependent behaviour of soils that are under cyclic loading conditions is of significant importance for long-term deformation and stability analysis of geo-structures that are subject to combined influence of soil creep and dynamic loadings, particularly offshore turbine foundations and railway embankments. The time-dependency in geomechanics is often related to soil viscosity which can lead to particular effects such as creep, stress relaxation, and strain-rate dependency of soil response. On the other hand, there are significant experimental evidence on soils hysteretic behaviour that is mainly related to non-linearity of soil response within the very small strain domain and the accumulation of irrecoverable strains under repetitive small-strain loadings. Although, in recent years considerable developments have been done on independent modelling of creep and cyclic responses in natural soils, very few studies have focused on capturing their combined effect within a unified framework. The aim of this research project is to develop a unified cyclic-creep constitutive model, mainly for clayey soils, and validate the model at both element-level and boundary value-level simulations. The project benefits from a considerable head start as it is in continuation of on-going research in the group on advance constitutive model development and numerical implementation.
The PhD student will become a member of the Ground Engineering research group which has well-equipped research laboratory and computational facilities and carries out practical research in geotechnical engineering. Within the project, there is scope to carry out advanced element-level experiments, should the project require original data for model verifications. There will also be opportunities to present the research outputs locally and at international conferences.
For informal enquiries, please send a CV, a covering letter stating how your interests and experience relate to the project, your academic transcripts and the names and email addresses of two academic referees to Dr Mohammad Rezania m.rezania@warwick.ac.uk.
Note: Should your application for admission be accepted you should be aware that this does not constitute an offer of financial support. Please refer to the scholarships & funding pages.