Parlons Sciences

Coline De Sousa was a 3rd year PhD student at École Centrale Nantes, under the supervision of Damien Violeau, David Le Touzé and Guillaume Oger. Her thesis is in partnership with EDF and deals with the SPH modelling of granular flows under water infiltration for the simulation of earthen dam break under the effect of a flood. Before her thesis, she studied numerical analysis at Nantes Université.

She has kindly agreed to present the results of her research at one of our upcoming events, one week before her PhD defense. Here was the abstract:

The hydroelectric engineering department of EDF is interested in modelling granular flows for several reasons. One of them is the study of earthen dam break under the effect of flooding. This type of flow is very complex and still difficult to simulate numerically. Thanks to its Lagrangian nature, the SPH method is well suited to applications involving free surfaces and large deformations. The objective of this thesis is to develop an SPH model for the simulation of water seepage in deformable granular medium. First, an SPH scheme stabilised using a Riemann solver is developed specifically for solid mechanics, with the aim of applying it to the granular phase of our model. Subsequently, a focus is made on the fluid phase by developing an SPH model for simulating water infiltration in a fixed and rigid porous matrix. A stabilisation using a Riemann solver is adopted here as well. In addition, an extension of the Boundary Integral Method for the numerical treatment of boundary conditions is proposed for granular applications. Eventually, the results obtained by coupling these two models in the case of a 2D seepage-flow induced embankment failure are discussed.