Alba Yerro Colom is seeking to understand soil behavior to ensure the safety of communities

Oblique aerial photograph of the 2014 landslide in northwest Washington, commonly named the “Oso Landslide” or the “SR530 Landslide,” as named by Snohomish County and Washington State. Credit: Mark Reid, USGS Alba Yerro Colom is seeking to understand soil behavior to ensure the safety of communities around the globe

“All civil infrastructure rests on, with, or in the ground,” said Assistant Professor Alba Yerro Colom. “Therefore, understanding soil behavior is essential to ensure the stability of all construction and the safety of our communities”

As global climate patterns are expected to change, soil conditions and hazards associated with those conditions will also change. Traditional methods to study soil mechanics and soil-structure problems strictly focus on the evaluation of failure and are unable to predict post-failure results. However, Colom states that understanding the whole deformation process is crucial to predict failure consequences, to improve risk assessment, and to reduce and mitigate damage in our communities. This is what led her to create an advanced framework that is capable to further investigate the consequences of soil behavior after failure through the numerical simulation of geotechnical problems that involve large deformations of the soil and interactions with water through landslides, dam failures, and internal erosion. Modeling these problems can present challenges that commercial software is unable to handle. Colom is developing a material point method (MPM), which is an advanced computational tool that can be applied to problems in a variety of geotechnical hazards, including landslides, soil-water-structure interaction, soil characterization, and soil reinforncement problems. Furthermore, the model can potentially be applied outside of geotechnical problems to help solve challenges in energy and transportation.

Colom is a founding member and software developer of Anura3D MPM Research Community. The community began in 2014 as a collaboration between nine universities and research institutes in Europe and the United States. The strategic aim is to consolidate the group as a world leader in the future generation of computational tools for large deformations, dynamics, and coupled analysis of a variety of geomechanics related problems.

Colom was born in Suria, a small town near Barcelona, Spain that has one of the largest potash underground mines (900-m deep) in Europe. Despite the efforts in keeping mines safe, underground collapses are relatively frequent and accidents happen often. After her grandfather lost his life in the mine, she was inspired to pursue a career in geotechnical engineering. “My goal is to continue to improve the predictive methods that inform decision-makers about risk of geotechnical hazards,” she said. “This will futher optimize the design of structures and protective barriers.”

Eventually, the developed numerical tool will be shared with researchers and practitioners at no cost through an open-source platform to inform, advance, and transform the way stability analyses are currently approached.