Your mission :
The Laboratory of Soil Mechanics (LMS) at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL Switzerland is seeking a scientific assistant to support the technological development of a technology transfer project named InSituStreTech.
LMS is a research lab dedicated to giving priority to the protection from geo-hazards and industrial damage to the environment, landforms and structure, mobilizing its experimental and modeling resources to understand, describe and predict the environmental impact of the technologies of future days, such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
CCS technology is nowadays recognized as crucial for mitigating climate change. Storing CO2 in geological formations (e.g., depleted hydrocarbon fields and deep saline aquifers) is currently considered the most attractive option. Geomechanical analyses for ensuring the efficiency and safety of CO2 storage require knowledge of the in-situ stress state. Compared to conventional geotechnical applications (e.g., foundations, retaining structures), the knowledge of the in-situ stress state for this engineering application has additional complexities due to the high depth (up to kilometers), complex stress history (current tectonic stresses, and residual stresses associated with past tectonic events, erosive and diagenetic processes) and often anisotropic stress states. Existing estimation methodologies have innumerable limitations and do not allow reliable determination of the complete stress state. The InSituStreTech project is developing an innovative technology suitable for in-situ stress estimation for CO2 geological storage. The proposed technology has a theoretical basis; it will use ad-hoc measurement tools, measurement protocols, and data analysis tools. InSituStreTech will contribute to today's sustainability challenge by proposing, on the one hand, a technology for improving the CCS mitigation strategy. On the other hand, it will be environmentally sustainable (from production to end-of-life, with particular emphasis on the chosen materials and the reusability of the tools). The target customers of the technology belong to the public and private sectors and involve all those entities responsible for the design and verification activities of CCS projects.