Staff profile

Luis (he/him) is a PhD student working under the supervision of Prof. Will Coombs and Prof. Charles Augarde in the Department of Engineering. He obtained his MSc. degree in Structural Engineering at University of Manchester in 2016. Awarded with CONACyT scholarship for current PhD and previous Msc studies. He is a current participant in Multidisciplinary Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Energy.

Research Project

 Developments in offshore industry present challenges in the design and performance evaluation of the foundations that support overlying structures near the seabed. Soil under cyclic loading for example, due to wave and wind action behave as a dissipative (plastic) material. Capturing soil’s irreversible stress-strain behaviour is a challenging task done through constitutive modelling. Constitutive models describe the mechanical behaviour of materials by expressing a relationship between stress and strain. A common drawback in constitutive models of soils is the limited stress range for which they were developed. Much attention in this research therefore focuses on situations of low effective stresses (where the latter is the difference between applied stress and pore water pressure) to widen the useful stress regime of soil models where we can accurately capture the behaviour of seabed soils under cyclic loading. The development of a reliable soil model will then allow a more accurate analysis and design of seabed foundations.

• Computational modelling of soils