[13/12/2023] Severo Ochoa Coffee Talk by Anibal Moncada

Polymeric reinforcement materials are used routinely in geotechnical engineering as reinforcements, stabilization, barrier systems, and other applications. The use of geosynthetics can play a defining role in meeting the global challenges facing society in terms of United Nations sustainability goals, approaches for counting carbon in both mitigating, and adapting to the impacts of climate change.
Polymeric materials have been shown to have a rate dependent response, that is, the mechanical behaviour will depend on time, load, temperature, and, arguably, soil moisture (or relative humidity). In reinforced soil structures, particularly in reinforced soil walls (RSWs), changes in atmospheric boundary conditions, which depend on the structure’s geographical location, can have a significant effect on the distributions of temperature, relative humidity, and degree of saturation within the backfill material. Consequently, the conditions that the embedded reinforcements must endure will depend on the structure’s location, where strength and stiffness of polymeric reinforcements can be expected to decrease with increased temperature and relative humidity. This has practical implications for the selection of the partial factor for creep and chemical degradation that are used in internal stability limit state design of RSWs.
This CIMNE coffee talk is focused on finite element model outcomes using the CODE_BRIGHT software of, first, thermo-hydraulic models of reinforced soil walls considering varying atmospheric conditions to estimate the magnitude and distribution of temperature, relative humidity, and degree of saturation within the backfill material, and second, the use of a viscoplastic constitutive model with temperature and relative humidity dependencies to properly model the long term response of polymeric strap reinforcements based on laboratory measured creep curves.
Further info: www.cimne.com/vnews/m1019/120...

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