2. If the current carrying rod is sufficiently large (a few millimeters in our installation), it is only partly evaporated by a discharge, and the factors influencing performance can be quantitatively studied. In particular, the amount of material melted and evaporated, and the temperatures reached by the current-carrying sheath, called the M-M (metal-megagauss) interface, can be investigated.

The physical description in itself can be based on the kind of coupling being involved (i.e., thermal, gravitational, electromagnetic, or by matter exchange). Gravitational coupling is related to celestial mechanics and tidal deformation. Thermal coupling is ultimately concerned with energy balance. Matter exchange is concerned with the interaction between contiguous systems, and particularly i...

Geophysical problems as forced-fold evolution and fault propagation induce large deformations and many localisation. The continuum mechanics does not seem the more appropriate for their description and it appears more interesting to represent the media as initially discontinuous. To face both phenomena, a non smooth Discrete Element Method is used. Geophysical structures are considered as colle...

[1] Recent work indicates that processes controlling solute mass transfer between mobile and less mobile domains in porous media may be quantified by combining electrical geophysical methods and electrically conductive tracers. Whereas direct geochemical measurements of solute preferentially sample the mobile domain, electrical geophysical methods are sensitive to changes in bulk electrical con...

The application of seawall deflectors for reflecting inviscid waves into the sea have been well established. Recently, rigid barrier deflectors have been proposed prescriptively for mitigating geophysical landslides, but flow characteristics differ fundamentally from waves and merit investigation. In this study, flume tests were used to calibrate a discrete element model to explore the interact...

Non-invasive geophysical imaging of Maori ancestral burial sites (urupa) have allowed us to test when and where geophysical surveys are most likely to succeed. Results from five sites, with both marked and unmarked graves, in three coastal settings along the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand show that burials in clay and silt (loess) can be readily identified using geophysical techn...

[1] Rock physics attempts to relate the geophysical response of a rock to geologic properties of interest, such as porosity, lithology, and fluid content. The geophysical properties estimated by field-scale surveys, however, are impacted by additional factors, such as complex averaging of heterogeneity at the scale of the survey and artifacts introduced through data inversion, that are not addr...