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Barcelona UPC

The Department of Geotechnical Engineering and Geosciences at UPC is considered a Centre of excellence for research within the Catalonia Research Plan framework. The Geomechanical group of the Geotechnical Department research is world leading on coupled hydraulic-mechanical phenomena in saturated and, especially, unsaturated porous materials.

Within the framework of the IRSES exchange, exchanges took place between UPC and Tongji University (Shanghai, China), Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore, India) and Tsinghua University (Beijing, China).

Research activities/achievements within Geohazards and Geomechanics project

- New developments of the Material Point Method (MPM) for the simulation of landslides

- Advances in the Discrete Element Method (DEM) for studying the geotechnical problems of methane hydrate.

fig_upc.jpg

Evolution of Vajont landslide with MPM for two values of the basal residual friction angle (Alonso et al., 2015).

• Relevant Publications

Alonso E E, Yerro A and Pinyol, N M (2015). Recent developments of the Material Point Method for the simulation of landslides. In IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science (Vol. 26, No. 1, p. 012003). IOP Publishing.

Mavrouli O and Corominas J (2015). Comparing kinematically detachable rock masses and rockfall scar volumes. In IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science (Vol. 26, No. 1, p. 012020). IOP Publishing.

Jiang M, Sun C, Rodríguez Dono A, Zhang N and Shao J (2015). Influence of time-dependence on failure of echelon rock joints through a novel DEM model. European Journal of Environmental and Civil Engineering. 19: 108-118.

Jiang M J, Chen H, Tapias M, Arroyo M and Fang R (2014). Study of mechanical behavior and strain localization of methane hydrate bearing sediments with different saturations by a new DEM model. Computers and Geotechnics, 57: 122-138.