The study of rock fractures is essential in evaluating stability of underground structures, understanding earthquakes, and assessing storage and transport of oil and gas in rock formations. Geophysical monitoring techniques, particularly compressional and shear wave propagation, can probe the internal structure of rock and fractures remotely and nondestructively and can provide insight into fra...

Drilling and blasting have numerous applications in the civil and mining engineering. Due to the two major components of rock masses, namely the intact rock matrix and the discontinuities, their behavior is a complicated process to be analyzed. The purpose of this work is to investigate the effects of the geomechanical and geometrical parameters of rock and discontinuities on the rock mass blas...

Tumors and associated stroma manifest mechanical properties that promote cancer. Mechanosensation of tissue stiffness activates the Rho/ROCK pathway to increase actomyosin-mediated cellular tension to re-establish force equilibrium. To determine how actomyosin tension affects tissue homeostasis and tumor development, we expressed conditionally active ROCK2 in mouse skin. ROCK activation elevate...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between Rho-associated kinase (ROCK) activity and aortic stiffness in humans. BACKGROUND Epidemiologic studies have shown that there is a relationship between aortic stiffness and cardiovascular complications. Recent evidence suggests that ROCK plays an important role in the process of atherosclerosis. METHODS We evaluat...

Fractures in rock masses influence strongly the mechanical and hydraulic properties of a rock mass. Thus, the detection and characterization of fractures using geophysical methods is of critical importance for maintaining the integrity of sub-surface infrastructure and subsurface waste or storage repositories. While the effects of single fractures or sets of parallel fractures on seismic wave p...

Current studies investigating the role of biophysical cues on cell migration focus on the use of culture platforms with static material parameters. However, migrating cells in vivo often encounter spatial variations in extracellular matrix stiffness. To better understand the effects of stiffness gradients on cell migration, we developed a 2.5D cell culture platform where cells are sandwiched be...

a r t i c l e i n f o The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of filling materials (e.g., quartz sand and kaolin clay) in the interaction between a P-wave and a rock fracture. The specific fracture stiffness reflects the seismic response of a filled fracture, while the wave transmission coefficient describes P-wave transmission across the filled fracture. A series of experimental t...

Fractured-rock aquifers display spatially and temporally variable hydraulic conductivity generally attributed to variable fracture intensity and connectivity. Empirical evidence suggests fracture aperture and hydraulic conductivity are sensitive to in situ stress. This study investigates the sensitivity of fractured-rock hydraulic conductivity, groundwater flow paths, and advectiondominated tra...

a r t i c l e i n f o The purpose of this study is to analytically predict and to experimentally investigate the seismic response of adjacent filled parallel rock fractures with dissimilar properties (e.g., fracture thickness and stiffness). The time-domain recursive method is extended to predict that a P-wave propagates normally across the filled parallel fractures using the specific stiffness...

The subject of this thesis forms part of a research program dealing with fractured rock masses being undertaken by the "Centre de Géologie de l'Ingénieur (CGI)" from the "Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (ENSMP)" and the "Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC)". In fractured rock masses, it is very difficult to undertake engineering works without analysing, beforehand, the f...