- Equipements
Geomaterials platform
Presentation
The interaction between the buildings and the land is never fully mastered because of the diversity of natural and artificial pitches, diversity and the increasing complexity of structures, environmental and financial constraints, the ever shorter imposed on projects or the heritage maintenance.
Platform for analysis of mechanical properties of materials, called Platform Geomaterials, has been built gradually over the past fifteen years. It examines in particular the natural soil, treated soil, industrial by-products or sediment. But it can extend its expertise to other materials such as concrete or sphalt concrete..etc.
It consists of three poles to characterize and study the nature and behavior:
 |
In the laboratory, we have all the facilities of standard geotechnical tests for the measurement of fine and granular materials in unsaturated media:
- Identification parameters (particle size, liquid limit and plasticity, densities ...),
- Mechanical properties (Proctor curve, compressive strength, shear strength, compressibility ...),
- Hydraulic properties (suction, permeability ...). </ ul> The laboratory is also interested in soil fatigue problems with the development of specific materials and methods, particularly with a cyclic fatigue test and a bending bench two points.
The "imaging and microanalysis" pole is dedicated to the observation of soil at scales between the micrometer and millimeter leading to the identification of the reactions between the components, especially in the treatment of soils.
Our activities are based on means specific preparation and three additional equipment allowing observations with various scales:
- an optical microscope with natural light source and source in ultraviolet light (shape and structure of materials)
- an analysis device by micro XRF (composition and distribution of chemical elements)
- a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and EDX probe (chemical composition and observation of minerals).
