Jie YANG did his PhD at GeM and defended his thesis at École Centrale de Nantes on 8 July 2019. In November 2020 he received the 2020 Centrale Innovation thesis prize. The thesis: https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02443260/document
Summary of his work:
Geo-structures such as dams and dikes are subjected to hydraulic flows that vary in time and space. Water flowing through these porous media can detach and transport some of the soil particles that make up the structures and their foundations.
This problem is generally referred to as “internal erosion”. Suffusion, a type of internal erosion, refers to the detachment and transport of the finest particles through a coarser porous soil matrix due to hydraulic flow. The evolution of suffusion over time can alter the hydraulic and mechanical properties of soils and may cause major changes in the behaviour of such structures, up to their collapse.
This thesis aims to contribute to the design and durability of geotechnical and hydraulic engineering structures, with a particular focus on dams, levees and dikes.
It was devoted to developing a numerical model of suffusion that couples hydraulic and mechanical phenomena on the one hand, and erosion and filtration phenomena on the other.
Centrale Innovation, a subsidiary of the Écoles Centrales of Lyon, Nantes and Marseille and of the École Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Saint-Etienne, awards a prize each year for the best thesis carried out in connection with industry. Its aim is to reward the best research work carried out as part of a PhD.