Davood Dadrasajirlou, PhD candidate at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at NTNU, joined our PoreLab team at NTNU. Davood started his PhD in July 2019. He is working on thermodynamic of deformable soft clays. The topic of his project can be connected to WP2 (deformable porous media) and WP5 (thermodynamic driving forces). His PhD is internally funded by NTNU. His supervisor is Professor Gustav Grimstad and his co-supervisor is Dr. Ali Amiri.
Welcome!
Short description of Davood’s PhD project: Modeling the mechanical response of natural soft soils constitutes a challenge due to a series of factors that are not always included in conventional constitutive models. In fact, the main inherent features that influence the response are combination of fabric, inter-particle bonding, rate and void dependency. In addition, the behavior under small strain and small strain amplitude cycles is also highly non-linear. these features have separately, or in combination, been put into constitutive models, in some cases by using only mathematical techniques without physical insight, for simulating particular features of soft soils behavior. As a shortcoming of this method, it causes the outcome models ‘too flexible’ to possibly disobey the First and/or Second Law of Thermodynamics, as well as the difficulty in obtaining a unique set of material parameters, for engineering practice, when only limited test data is available. In this research, rigorous thermodynamic frameworks will be used to remediate this shortcoming and develop a full constitutive model.