Emerging Scientists Session
Phase-field Modeling of Geologic Fractures
- Prof. Jinhyun Choo
- Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Biography
Jinhyun Choo is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at KAIST. He researches next-generation methods to understand, predict, and manage the behavior of complex physical systems as they relate to safeguarding and decarbonizing the built environment. He specializes in computational mechanics and multiphysics of porous, granular, and discontinuous materials including geomaterials. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar, conducted postdoctoral research at Columbia University, and worked as a faculty at the University of Hong Kong before relocating to KAIST. He is a member of various technical committees in the American Society of Civil Engineers and the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering. He also serves as an editorial board member of several journals in his field, including Acta Geotechnica and Computers and Geotechnics.
Introduction of the Lecture
Geologic fractures such as joints and faults govern the stability and performance of many subsurface systems in the built environment. As such, a variety of approaches have been developed for computational modeling of geologic fractures. Yet none of them lends itself to a straightforward utilization with the classical finite element method widely used in practice. Over the past decade, phase-field modeling has become a popular approach for simulating fracture, because it can be implemented simply with the standard finite element method without any surface-tracking algorithms. However, the standard phase-field formulations lack several critical features of geologic fractures, including frictional contact, pressure dependence, quasi-brittleness, mode-mixity, roughness, and their combined impacts on cracking. This lecture introduces a family of novel phase-field models that incorporate the distinct features of geologic fractures in a well-verified and validated manner. It is also demonstrated how phase-field modeling enables us to gain insights into geologic fractures that are challenging to investigate experimentally.