GREAT | 2019

WHAT IS THE INFLUENCE OF HEAT FLOWS ON THE STRUCTURE, PROPERTIES AND BEHAVIOR OF GRANULAR MATERIALS?

The GREAT project – a contraction of Granular and Heat – investigates the physics of granular materials subjected to heat flows.

Granular materials such as soils are continuously subjected to temperature variations due to natural or anthropogenic perturbations. These temperature variations cause thermally induced deformations of the particles constituting such materials.

Thermal deformations cause the particles of granular materials to rearrange. These microstructural rearrangements alter the physical properties of granular materials, influencing their ability to transfer heat, sustain loads, and allow fluid permeation. These effects, in turn, influence the behavior of granular materials.
Within this project, state-of-the-art experimental, analytical and computational techniques are employed to advance the current understanding of the influence of thermal perturbations on the physics of granular materials as well as to assess if such perturbations can be engineered in the form of thermal treatments to tailor the properties and behavior of granular materials for engineering applications.

Project team


Alessandro F. Rotta Loria
Assistant Professor

Jibril Coulibaly
Postdoctoral Researcher

Yize Pan
Ph.D. Student

Project team


Alessandro F. Rotta Loria
Assistant Professor

Jibril Coulibaly
Postdoctoral Researcher

Yize Pan
Ph.D. Student

Journal publications

→ Rotta Loria, A. F. and Coulibaly, J. B. (2020) Thermally induced deformation of soils: a critical overview of phenomena, challenges and opportunitiesGeomechanics for Energy and the Environment. 15: 100193.
→ Pan, Y., Coulibaly, J. B. and Rotta Loria, A. F. (2020) Thermally induced deformation of coarse-grained soils under nearly zero vertical stressGéotechnique Letters. 10(4), 486-491.
→ Coulibaly, J. B., Shah, M. and Rotta Loria, A. F. (2020) Thermal cyclic loading of granular materials: effects on material fabric and propertiesGranular Matter. 22(80): 1-19.
→ Pan, Y., Coulibaly, J. B. and Rotta Loria, A. F. (2022) An experimental investigation challenging the thermal collapse of sands. Géotechnique In print.
Coulibaly, J. and Rotta Loria, A. F. (2022) Transient dynamics of the thermally induced deformation of sands. International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics. 46(10): 1972-1988.