The UKACM 2023Link opens in a new window was hosted at Warwick during 19th-21st April. The event, that was co-chaired by Dr Rezania and Dr Mousavi Nezhad, was a great success. This was the first time that UK Computational Mechanics community came to Warwick and they have been impressed by the conference organisation, Warwick campus and the research we do here. There was a great opening talk by Sotaro Kita, director of research culture, about STEM grant challenge and Warwick’s future research plan. We had representative from over 30 universities, 70 talks scheduled and delivered in three parallel sessions, 5 Keynotes speeches and two lectures delivered by outstanding scientists.

Special Thanks to the conference scientific committee, Toby Mottram, James Kermode, Duncan Lockerby, Albert Bartok-Partay, Susana Gomes, and Lukasz Figiel. Thanks are extended to the members of our research team, Nima Sarmadi, Hamid Moghimi, Hesam Dejaloud, Stefano Seccia, Huxi Xin, Thanh Vo, and Josephine Foghi who helped a great deal in running the conference smoothly.

We are excited to share that our work "Adaptive anisotropic constitutive modeling of natural claysLink opens in a new window" published in International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics by Dejaloud and Rezania, is recognised as the Top Downloaded Article in the journal during its first 12 months of publication!

Our journal paper "Double image stress point bounding surface model for monotonic and cyclic loading on anisotropic claysLink opens in a new window" was featured by distinguished Prof. John Carter in his 2023 Rankine Lecture on "Constitutive Modelling in Computational Geomechanics". Prof Carter praised our work in setting good practice on model parameter determination, he mentioned that "the authors provided a flowchart that guides you through the process for determining values of their model’s parameters and it’s most instructive, not only does it advise what type of test should be used to identify certain parameters but it also provides useful advice of when and importantly when not to adopt their model and in my opinion it would be very useful if others would follow this type of example". We are very pleased by these comments from such an eminent scientist in the field of constitutive modelling.

The full lecture can be watched from YouTube link: 61st Annual BGA Rankine LectureLink opens in a new window.

The 7th MINRESCUE progress meeting was held at BRGM office in Paris on the 27th January 2023. The project reaches the time when first set of technical results can be produced as deliverable reports.

At this stage the utilization of CMWGs as additives to conventional and polymer concrete products is well investigated in course of comprehensive experimental tests. Also, the work on new constitutive model is near to the end. The future work will focus on the development of new products together with their assessment of the LCA analysis. The discussions led by Dr Rezania (the project coordinator) were focused on the potential of results exploitation and organization of the Project Symposium that will be held in Katowice in June 2023.