PhD Thesis (2025-2028)

Title:  Seismic wave propagation in multi-scale fractured media

Supervisors: Paul Cupillard & Dragan Grgic (GeoRessources, Université de Lorraine)

The objective of the thesis is to improve our understanding of the interaction between seismic waves and fractures across multiple scales. Tectonic processes and industrial exploitation of the subsurface induce brittle deformations in the earth's crust, leading to fractures at all scales organized in networks characterized by their density, connectivity, and distribution of aperture, length and orientation. While geological observations evidence that power law distributions appropriately describe fracture density as a function of size, current studies on seismic wave propagation in fractured media have been restricted to short ranges of sizes for theoretical and computational reasons. The project will build on recent advances in non-periodic homogenization to compute effective properties of fractures following realistic power law distributions, with numerical methodologies tested and validated against laboratory experiments on core samples.