I am very happy that we have now published a new paper in Ocean Engineering, about improved prediction of soil properties based on free-fall cone penetrometer data. We managed to go all the way from the experimental data to numerical simulations to a simple design method improvement. Congratulations to Debasis and the whole team who helped with the paper!
The paper can be found here for some time. After the link expires, you can find a late draft version at research.aalto.fi
Photo by Aalto University/Mikko Raskinen
Please come and join us at Aalto on the 11th of June. We start at 9.45 am in R3. See the programme and details here: https://sgy.fi/tapahtumat/geotechnical-seminar-at-aalto/
Chenjie Ruan, a doctoral student in my group, is the first author in a very nice paper on soil freezing. The new thermodynamically compliant framework may predict soil freezing and frost heave quite well, with a limited amount of input data. Check it here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165232X26000972
Reza Khalili, another doctoral student in my group, is the first author of a paper where we calculated settlements of an underwater embankment securing a cable. Soil data comes from the Geomeasure project, with settlements computed with Soft Soil Creep and Creep S-Clay1S. The results are very interesting, and we still do not fully understand why the creep component of settlements depends so much on the permeability of soil. If you have any thoughts on this issue, please email me at wojciech.solowski@aalto.fi
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0029801826003306
Congratulations Reza and Chenjie! Great work!
Recently we published two journal papers. First in Engineering Geology:
Assessment of near-surface undrained shear strength of soft seabeds with free fall cone penetrometer testing in the northern Baltic Sea by Maarit Saresma, David J. White, Debasis Mohapatra, Saeideh Mohammadi, Wojciech Sołowski, Leena Korkiala-Tanttu, Joonas J. Virtasalo and Susan Gourvenec, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enggeo.2025.107906 The paper was written in cooperation with Professors Gourvenec and White from the University of Southampton, our partners in Geomeasure project.
Figure 8 from Saresma et al. , https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enggeo.2025.107906
The other paper was published in International Journal of Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics:
Laboratory-Scale Free Fall Cone Penetrometer Test on Marine Clay: A Numerical Investigation Using the Generalized Interpolation Material Point Method by Debasis Mohapatra, Saeideh Mohammadi, Maarit Saresma, Joonas J. Virtasalo, Wojciech T. Sołowski, https://doi.org/10.1002/nag.3929 , another paper that was written based on research made in Geomeasure project.
Figure 13 from Mohapatra et al. , https://doi.org/10.1002/nag.3929
Furthermore, the Geomeasure research was presented during seminars at Chalmers University of Technology, in Gothenburg, Sweden and at Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. The presentation is here.
I am also pleased to share our presentation from Geomeasure seminar on the 16th of December:
Offshore site characterisation by Maarit Saresma
Offshore sample characterisation and testing by Saeideh Mohammadi
Numerical replication of experimental data by Debasis Mohapatra
Construction of offshore infrastructure by Reza Khalili
(c) image: Aalto University / Kaaria
We are organising the seminar where we will show all the research we have done in Geomeasure (first morning session). It is on Monday the 16th of December 2024, with the details here. You can also join remotely (the link in the file)!
The seminar is directed towards engineers and non-scientists. We go to great lengths to show our research so you can understand it and see what we have achieved! As an extra, we will also discuss how to secure electric underwater cables by embedding them in gravel. This way the cable is well cooled, while an accidental anchor should not damage it.
Everyone is welcome!
Figure 1. Cracked ring expansion and contraction
Tito Adibaskoro with co-workers published a very significant development related to simulating cracks in the Material Point Method (MPM). The paper “Multiple discrete crack initiation and propagation in Material Point Method” is published in the Engineering Fracture Mechanics Journal. The paper describes how to extend the Nairn’s Cracks in MPM (CRAMP) algorithm so the cracks can be initiated in any place of the domain, propagate over a path that is determined during the simulation, as well as merge or split during the propagation.
Figure 2. Cracking of a plate with large deformations and no initial crack
The large displacements, inherent to MPM are fully supported, as well as all the explicit MPM algorithms. The paper focuses on the CPDI version of MPM, but the algorithm can be implemented in any mainstream MPM algorithm. The proposed algorithm is also very efficient, reducing the amount of calculations when compared to the original CRAMP very considerably, due to reducing the required number of background grids. Hence, simulations with many cracks are actually doable in reasonable time!
The paper has linked open source code, so it is very easy to try it yourself!
Figure 3. Multiple cracks propagation and merging
Tito Adibaskoro, Stéphane Bordas, Wojciech T. Sołowski, Simo Hostikka,
Multiple discrete crack initiation and propagation in Material Point Method,
Engineering Fracture Mechanics, Volume 301, 2024, 109918, ISSN 0013-7944,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engfracmech.2024.109918.
Abhishek Gupta, Ayman Abed and me have suggested what key processes to model in a deep geological repository, as affected by temperature. The research is published in Engineering Geology journal (link). It seems that especially changes of the water vapour density with temperature, changes of viscosity of water with temperature, and the changes in the water retention curve (in our case, van Genuchten with thermal coupling) are important and may make tens or more percent of difference. Thermal expansion of water is also very important when the material is fully saturated.
The research was co-funded by EURAD gas subproject and Aalto University Dean’s scholarship. (EURAD – European joint programme on radioactive waste management (Gas subproject). EURAD has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement n°847593)
We got the paper accepted that extends the Granular Material Point Method into unsaturated soil regime. Please have a look here. This is the final paper of Seyedan doctoral thesis. Seyedan has graduated with doctoral degree from Aalto few months ago. Congratulations!
It has been very busy weeks, turning into busy months and without noticing, almost a year has passed. The main news is that I got a Academy of Finland project, Compact It, and we still are looking for a researcher who would be interested to take part. Your task will be to use and develop Granular Material Point Method and Uintah software suite, to model dynamic soil exchange. The project will involve close cooperation with Menard and build over resaerch from 2013. You can find the advertisement at Aalto webpage. The position is open until filled. Please apply, I try to check the applications weekly!
Academy of Finland has awarded Aalto & Geological Survey Finland consortium financing for the Geomeasure project. We will investigate the Finnish seabed with GTK research vessel Geomari and find new ways to interpret the results of the tests, in particular free fall penetrometer tests. To do that, we will take samples from the seabed and correlate results of experimental testing with the penetrometer data. Also, the tests will be numerically modelled with MPM. We also plan to investigate the behaviour of the deposits under cyclic loading, typical for wind turbines.
Our review paper on Material Point Method is now available here. The link will expire in a month, but I hope that by that time we will be able to provide a copy that could be used instead.
Please have a look, and let me thank all the co-authors: professors Martin Berzins, Will Coombs, Jim Guilkey, Matthias Möller and Kenichi Soga, as well as the doctoral students (some of whom graduated by now): , Tito Adibaskoro, Seyedmohammadjavad Seyedan, Roel Tielen and Quoc Anh Tran (all the names in alphabetical order). Thank you again!