Promotion lecture - Ayman Abed

Welcome to attend the promotion lecture of Ayman Abed, for Docent at the Division of Geology and Geotechnics, Research Area Geotechnics. After the lecture everyone is invited to join in at the celebration in 387.

Abstract:
The scope of geotechnical engineering is expanding to address challenges across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, including regional subsidence, landslides, and the prediction of future climate-driven impacts on geostructures. Addressing these issues requires integrating multiple interacting physical processes, developing physics-based constitutive laws and governing equations for geomaterials, and employing computational framework capable of solving the resulting coupled Multiphysics problems.

This lecture will summarize my research aimed at meeting these challenges. At Chalmers, we exploit the Finite Element Method and the FEniCSx platform to develop a state-of-the-art computational framework for simulating mechanical, hydraulic, and thermal processes. With the core components now operational, ongoing and future work will focus on geometry updating, advanced material models, and code optimization, including integration with Python-based workflows for AI-driven applications.

While the emphasis of the current research is on the stability of natural slopes and the thermo-hydro-mechanical behaviour of sensitive clays, the framework is readily extendable to the design of nuclear waste barriers, multiphase flow, expansive soils, and the modelling other porous materials such as rock and concrete.