Laboratoire Navier (UMR 8205)

Research at Laboratoire Navier is devoted to the mechanics and physics of materials and structures, in geotechnics, and their applications to in particular civil engineering and petroleum geophysics.

The research relates to energy issues, through studies devoted to nuclear waste disposal and petroleum engineering; to environmental issues, through studies devoted to the eco-design of structures and building materials, to sustainability issues, through studies devoted to the long-term behavior of materials and their engineering.

One part of the team rather focuses on solid mechanics, while another part of the team rather focuses on the physics of porous media.

For the part of the team rather focusing on solid mechanics, materials of interest include clay, wood, cement, or rocks. Many of those materials exhibit a porosity that spans several orders of magnitude, down to the nanometer scale. We look at how those materials behave mechanically under multiphysics solicitation. The role of an in-pore fluid (water, hydrocarbons,…) is important for our applications of interest.

For the part of the team focusing rather on the physics of porous media, problems of interest include transport of fluid through porous media, and drying of porous media.

Our approaches combine experimentation, characterization (in particular, 2D and 3D imaging through X-ray microtomography and proton MRI), and modeling (in particular, atomistic simulations, poromechanics, upscaling methods), at a variety of scales ranging from the atomistic scale up to the scale of the engineer.