The 2nd “Ioannis Vardoulakis” thesis prize was attributed to Siddhartha H. Ommi at the annual ALERT Geomaterials workshop held in Aussois from September 25 to 27, 2023.
Siddhartha completed his thesis entitled ‘Study of hydro-mechanical instabilities in geomaterials’, defended on April 14, 2022, at GeM – École Centrale de Nantes, under the supervision of Giulio SCIARRA and the co-direction of Panagiotis KOTRONIS.
In his thesis, Siddhartha studied two main aspects that can be categorized as failures during two-phase fluid flow (water and air) within geomaterials, such as soils: 1) the preferential inhomogeneous invasion of one fluid over the other, and 2) the periodic initiation of cracks during such flow. This thesis has left in its wake numerous possibilities ranging from coupled formulations to experimental investigations. This work is fundamental in the context of underground storage of CO2, Hydrogen and also to explain interesting geometric crack patterns found in nature. Siddhartha’s work can be viewed by following this link-HAL : https://hal.science/search/index?q=siddhartha+ommi
After working as a postdoctoral researcher at La Sapienza University in Rome until the end of August 2023, Siddhartha joined GeM on September 1, 2023 as Associate Professor at Centrale Nantes.
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The “Ioannis Vardoulakis” prize was created by the ALERT (Alliance of Laboratories in Europe for Education, Research and Technology) Geomaterials association to promote the dissemination of scientific research carried out by doctoral students in the field of soil, rock and concrete mechanics. The prize is €1,000 for first place and €500 for each of the other two finalists.