Welcome

I am currently a doctoral candidate at the Geo-Energy Lab of EPFL. I have wide interests ranging from the mechanics of friction and fracture in geomaterials to the physics of earthquakes and faulting. During my PhD, I'm focused on understanding coupled hydro-mechanical processes in faults and fractured rocks. Generally, I use tools of theoretical and computational mechanics to understand the interplay between different physical processes involved in both natural and human-induced phenomena. An important part of my research is to link my model's predictions to laboratory experiments and field observations.

Biography

I obtained my master in earthquake engineering and my civil engineer title at the University of Chile in the year 2014. Prior to joining EPFL in 2019, I worked in the mining industry in Chile and I also travelled around the world for two years.

Current work

I am currently working on the mechanics of fluid-driven stable frictional ruptures. We have recently provided the first analytical and numerical solutions for fluid-induced stable fault slip in 3-D media. Fluid-driven stable frictional ruptures play an important role in a number of geo-energy applications (deep geothermal energy, hydrocarbon operations, CO2 geological storage) and natural phenomena in geophysics (fluid-driven seismic swarms and aftershock sequences, slow slip events). Find the link to our article in the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids below.

Now, I'm working on the propagation and arrest of stable frictional ruptures after injection stops, and the relation between the moment release due to aseismic motion and operational parameters such as the injection duration and injected volume of fluid. I am also looking at problems in which fluid flow leads to unstable fault slip.