Master Thesis

I did an internship at the University of Queensland with the Geotechnical Engineering Center in 2017. I was supervised Thierry Bore and Eric Vourc'h and worked on the implementation of time domain reflectometry inversion on Matlab.

The main idea was to determine porosity profiles from reflected signals. A fast time domain reflectometry inversion was developed using:

– A conjugate gradient method to invert the finite-difference time-domain model of the telegrapher’s equations,

– a geometrical model for a coaxial line,

– a mixing rule to give a link between permittivity and porosity.

Once calibrated and validated, the algorithm was used to observe porosity changes. 

To understand, monitor and prevent the process of contact erosion, an experimental set-up has been designed to perform erosion tests under different hydraulic boundary conditions and different combinations of granular media. In a high frequency transmission line, time-domain reflectometry (TDR) measurements have also been carried out during the experiments.