CLIMA/Collaborative Research: Landslide Triggering of Thermally Sensitive Slopes due to Climate Change

CLIMA/合作研究：气候变化引发热敏斜坡滑坡

• 批准号: 2332069
• 负责人: Emmanouil Veveakis
• 金额: $ 34.94万
• 依托单位: Duke University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2024-01-01 至 2026-12-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2332069&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CLIMA; Collaborative; Research; Landslide; Triggering

This CiviL Infrastructure research for climate change Mitigation and Adaptation (CLIMA) award supports research focused on understanding the risk of increased catastrophic landslides of historically stable or slowly creeping natural soil slopes due to the presence of soil materials that are thermally sensitive, i.e., they exhibit significant changes of strength and stiffness in response to a change of temperature. This is important in view of current and increased greenhouse gas emissions and the link to increases of the average planet temperature. Explaining, and hence predicting, the initiation, progression and size of landslides remains challenging for physicists, geologists and engineers. This project advances the science of when and how temperature changes could trigger these catastrophic, and potentially deadly, events. This research specifically targets the link between the observed behavior of small volumes of natural material at different temperatures and the stability of large natural soil slopes experiencing a temperature change. Building on this link, the scope to improve the resiliency of natural soil slopes to warming climates by reducing their thermal sensitivity using carbon nano fibers will be explored. Finally, the research will be further leveraged to produce undergraduate teaching materials to demonstrate how Civil Engineering research and practice can adapt to climatic changes. The research explores the multi-physics thermal soil response and link to catastrophic slope failures, distinguishing between the role of the soil’s micro and macroscopic properties versus a change to its state. The central hypothesis is that at higher temperatures thermomechanical softening is the dominant mechanism that triggers deep-seated slope movements in thermally sensitive slopes. A suite of thermal triaxial tests and centrifuge experiments on reduced scale slopes of thermally sensitive materials will bridge the existing gap between experimental observations of the thermomechanical behavior of soils at the element level and the observations of slope failures in the field. A specialized climate chamber within a geotechnical centrifuge will enable isothermal tests and controlled temperature increments to model climatic warming on a reduced scale model capturing the non-linear and stress dependent behavior of the full-scale slope. The results will enrich and validate predictive, thermally sensitive visco-plastic constitutive models. The combined datasets will ultimately allow the assessment of the relative importance of different deformation and failure mechanisms induced in a thermally sensitive soil slope. These will be further used to inform and test the effectiveness of targeting the material’s fabric at the microscale to increase the resiliency of thermally sensitive slopes to warming climates.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这项针对气候变化减缓和适应的民用基础设施研究 (CLIMA) 奖项支持的研究重点是了解历史上稳定或缓慢蠕动的自然土壤斜坡由于存在热敏感土壤材料而增加灾难性山体滑坡的风险，即它们表现出考虑到当前和增加的温室气体排放以及与地球平均温度增加的联系，强度和刚度随温度变化而发生显着变化。滑坡的发生、进展和规模对于物理学家、地质学家和工程师来说仍然是一个挑战，该项目推进了温度变化何时以及如何引发这些灾难性且可能致命的事件的科学。这项研究专门针对观察到的小型滑坡行为之间的联系。不同温度下天然材料的体积以及经历温度变化的大型天然土壤坡度的稳定性在此基础上，将探索通过使用碳纳米纤维降低天然土壤坡度的热敏感性来提高天然土壤坡度对气候变暖的弹性的范围。 。最后，该研究将进一步用于制作本科教材，以展示土木工程研究和实践如何适应气候变化。该研究探讨了多物理热土响应及其与灾难性边坡破坏的联系，区分了土木工程研究和实践如何适应气候变化。土壤的微观和宏观特性与其状态的变化之间的关系的中心假设是，在较高温度下，热机械软化是触发热敏感斜坡的深层斜坡运动的主要机制。在热敏材料的缩小比例斜坡上进行的离心实验将弥补单元层面土壤热机械行为的实验观察与现场斜坡破坏观察之间的现有差距，岩土离心机内的专用气候室将能够进行等温测试。并控制温度增量，在缩小规模的模型上模拟气候变暖，捕获全尺寸斜坡的非线性和应力相关行为，结果将丰富和验证预测性热敏粘塑性。组合的数据集最终将允许评估热敏感土壤坡度中引起的不同变形和破坏机制的相对重要性，这些将进一步用于告知和测试在微观尺度上瞄准材料结构的有效性。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。