I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Alpine Mass Movements group of ETH Zürich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF) in Davos. In 2023, I defended my PhD in Mechanics at EPFL, supervised by Prof. J. Gaume and Prof. J.-F. Molinari. My research focuses on computational modeling of the mechanics of porous solids and granular flows, with a particular emphasis on snow. I’m currently working with the Material Point Method (MPM), however, I am interested in the development and application of all kinds of numerical methods in solid and fluid mechanics.

Previously, I have worked for DNV Oil&Gas, EVRY Consulting and interned at FFI and Equinor. I received a Master of Science in Computational Science and Engineering from ETH Zürich in 2018, with the thesis entitled Computing Measure-Valued Solutions of the Leray-Alpha Model of Turbulence supervised by Prof. S. Mishra at the Seminar for Applied Mathematics.

Publications

A critical state μ(I)-rheology model for cohesive granular flows

L. Blatny, J.M.N.T. Gray and J. Gaume
Journal of Fluid Mechanics, vol. 997 (2024)
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Transition between mechanical and geometric controls in glacier crevassing processes

H. Rousseau, J. Gaume, L. Blatny and M. Lüthi
Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 51 (2024)
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Microstructural controls on the plastic consolidation of porous brittle solids

L. Blatny, H. Löwe and J. Gaume
Acta Materialia, vol. 250 (2023)
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A depth-averaged material point method for shallow landslides: Applications to snow slab avalanche release

L. Guillet, L. Blatny, B. Trottet, D. Steffen and J. Gaume
Journal of Geophysical Research - Earth Surface, vol. 128 (2023)
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Microstructural origin of propagating compaction patterns in porous media

L. Blatny, P. Berclaz, F. Guillard, I. Einav and J. Gaume
Physical Review Letters, vol. 128 (2022)
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This work was featured in Physics Magazine

Towards a predictive multi-phase model for alpine mass movements and process cascades

A. Cicoira, L. Blatny, X. Li, B. Trottet and J. Gaume
Engineering Geology, vol. 310 (2022)
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Computational micromechanics of porous brittle solids

L. Blatny, H. Löwe, S. Wang and J. Gaume
Computers and Geotechnics, vol. 140 (2021)
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My PhD thesis is available here. DOI: 10.5075/epfl-thesis-10267

Invited talks and presentations

• Oct 24, 2024: Continuum modeling of cohesive and compressible granular flows with elasto-viscoplasticity
  60th Anniversary of Groupe Français de Rhéologie, Marseille, France

• Sep 30, 2024: The emergence of propagating compaction bands in porous inelastic media
  ALERT Geomaterials Workshop 2024, Aussois, France

• Jul 4, 2024: Modeling snow through its solid and liquid phase
  SANDLESS 2024, Sydney, Australia

• Oct 11, 2023: Modeling cohesive and compressible granular flows with critical state µ(I)-rheology
  Society of Engineering Sciences 2023, Minneapolis, USA

• Jun 2, 2023: Erosion, deposition, waves and rate-dependency in alpine mass movements
  INRAE MPM Workshop 2023, Aix-en-Provence, France

• Oct 18, 2022: Modeling granular media by combining μ(I)-rheology and critical state soil mechanics
  Graphyz2 - The First Graphics-Physics Workshop, 2nd Ed., Arc-et-Senans, France

• Sep 29, 2022: An elastic–viscoplastic constitutive model for snow avalanche dynamics
  IGS International Symposium on Snow, Davos, Switzerland

• Aug 2, 2022: Plastic collapse in porous brittle solids
  15th World Congress on Computation Mechanics (WCCM), Yokohama (virtual)

• May 10, 2022: Constitutive modeling of snow
  MultiPLES Laboratory, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

• Sep 8, 2021: Investigating the mechanics of porous brittle solids with the material point method and Gaussian random field microstructures
  XVI International Conference on Computational Plasticity (COMPLAS), Barcelona, Spain

• Apr 27, 2021: A unified framework for computational microstructure-based snow mechanics
  EGU General Assembly, Vienna (virtual)

• May 8, 2020: Microstructure-based modeling of snow using the material point method and finite strain elastoplasticity
  EGU General Assembly, Vienna (virtual)

Code

I am soon releasing an efficient and low-dependency Material Point Method code written in C++ for modeling elasto-viscoplastic materials. It is parallelized with OpenMP and easily adaptable to many problems. Many constitutive models are directly avalaible, formulated in a finite strain framework. The code is called Ma++er (pronounced Matter).
Please contact me if you are interested!

More info coming soon!