Geoscience Reference
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could perform experiments. A course in soil mechanics was inaugurated at the Ecole
Centrale in the 1963 academic year. Biarez's course in Paris was based on the same
policy that he instituted in Grenoble; for example, in order to major in civil
engineering, a student was obliged to work on a project with a correspondent or
tutor from industry. From 1969 onwards, the student's final project consisted of a
three-month internship on a subject chosen by a company. Work on a project could
be done by the student at any time from the start of the third year.
While teaching at his Alma Mater , Biarez kept his position as Associate
Professor and, later, as Professor at the University of Grenoble until 1977, the year
he became a full-time Professor at Ecole Centrale in Paris. Biarez was very
conscious of the fact that to train a civil engineer properly required a long time.
During the three years at Ecole Centrale , and even with complementary courses, the
students had an opportunity to learn methods of reflection and reasoning; they were
given theoretical tools that they could not necessarily master. The students were
constantly reminded that experience, not theory, was the best of all teachers if
accompanied by critical analysis. Soil in situ , they were told, is much more complex
than the most elaborate model imagined by the human brain and human factors
could often complicate an already complex situation.
In 1969, Ecole Centrale moved to its modern campus in Châtenay-Malabry, a
suburb in the south of Paris. The soil mechanics laboratory could finally develop
into a first-class research center, thanks to increased space and state-of-the-art
equipment, for example, an MTS press with a closed-loop control system, or a
Weissenberg rheogoniometer, to investigate stress−strain relations.
The development of numerical devices in engineering brought profound changes
to the research fields of civil engineering and soil mechanics, in particular. It was the
aeronautics firm Boeing that developed the finite element method (FEM) in 1953,
thanks to ever more powerful computers. Applied to civil engineering, the FEM
made complex calculations possible that had been impossible to carry out using
analytical methods. Representing the soil by non-linear, i.e. elastoplastic, models
made it possible to unite two major fields of soil mechanics: the problems of
settlement analyzed by elasticity theory and problems of limit load examined by
plasticity theory. From then on, a single computation could give the deformations
under nominal and maximal loads.
Constantly seeking more efficient calculation tools, Biarez immediately grasped
the revolutionary impact of this technological breakthrough. He deserves full credit
for bringing the FEM to the research laboratory at Ecole Centrale . Indeed, this
laboratory was for a number of years one of the rare places in France where students
could discover the civil engineering application of this new tool. As early as 1966,
his students at Ecole Centrale became familiar with advanced computer techniques.
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