Person:
Viesca, Robert Christian

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Viesca

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Robert Christian

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Viesca, Robert Christian

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Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Publication
    Modeling Slope Instability as Shear Rupture Propagation in a Saturated Porous Medium
    (Springer Verlag, 2009) Viesca, Robert Christian; Rice, James
    When a region of intense shear in a slope is much thinner than other relevant geometric lengths, this shear failure may be approximated as localized slip, as in faulting, with strength determined by frictional properties of the sediment and effective stress normal to the failure surface. Peak and residual frictional strengths of submarine sediments indicate critical slope angles well above those of most submarine slopes—in contradiction to abundant failures. Because deformation of sediments is governed by effective stress, processes affecting pore pressures are a means of strength reduction. However, common methods of exami ning slope stability neglect dynamically variable pore pressure during failure. We examine elastic-plastic models of the capped Drucker-Prager type and derive approximate equations governing pore pressure about a slip surface when the adjacent material may deform plastically. In the process we identify an elastic-plastic hydraulic diffusivity with an evolving permeability and plastic storage term analogous to the elastic term of traditional poroelasticity. We also examine their application to a dynamically propagating subsurface rupture and find indications of downslope directivity.
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    Elastic Reciprocity and Symmetry Constraints on the Stress Field Due to a Surface-Parallel Distribution of Dislocations
    (Elsevier, 2011) Viesca, Robert Christian; Rice, James
    Elastic reciprocity and geometric symmetry are used to constrain the expressions for stresses due to introduction of line dislocations near a half-space surface. Specifically, a relationship is shown to exist between the changes induced by dislocations of orthogonal Burgers vectors (normal and parallel to the free surface). These results are used to address inconsistencies of solutions in the literature.