About
Dr Antonis Zervos is an Associate Professor in Geomechanics within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton.
Research
Research interests
- The mechanics of railway ballast and ballasted track.
- The mechanics of catastrophic landslides.
- Modelling the effects of material microstructure.
Current research
Antonis Zervos’s technical area of expertise is the constitutive and numerical modelling of geomaterials; his work is focussed on understanding, describing mathematically and approximating numerically the mechanical behaviour of soils and rocks. He is an experienced numerical modeller with significant expertise in programming and using finite element and finite difference codes, as well as using boundary element and distinct element software.
He has an active interest in the following applications:
The mechanics of railway ballast and ballasted track. The majority of the railway network in the UK and worldwide is on ballasted track. Better scientific understanding of its mechanics and the interaction of its components will allow the design of more robust railway track that needs maintenance less often.
The mechanics of catastrophic landslides. Large scale catastrophic landslides on land or under sea can be a major threat to human life and infrastructure. Better understanding the conditions under which they may develop and the factors that govern their catastrophic potential will enable the design of appropriate mitigation measures and robust defences.
Modelling the effects of material microstructure. Although their effect is largely ignored in the theoretical framework that underpins every-day practice, the microstructural details (e.g. grain size) of a soil or rock may come to dominate its mechanical response. Our research develops theoretical and numerical tools for including such information when predicting material behaviour.
Finally, geomaterial modelling is an integral part of tackling problems relevant to the production of oil and natural gas. Mostly during his time at Schlumberger Cambridge Research, Antonis Zervos carried out research and consultancy on petroleum geomechanics, and particularly on hydraulic fracturing, on the stability of inclined wellbores and perforations, on wellbore-screen interaction, and on stress determination around large geological structures.
Research projects
Active projects
Completed projects
Publications
Supervision
Current PhD Students
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
Dr Antonis Zervos is an Associate Professor in Geomechanics within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton.
Antonis Zervos graduated in 1996 from the Faculty of Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, with a 5-year degree in Civil Engineering. In the same year he joined the Doctoral Programme of NTUA’s Department of Mechanics, from where he obtained a PhD in 2001. His research was sponsored by Schlumberger Cambridge Research through a research assistantship at their Cambridge facilities between 1996 and 2001. After obtaining his PhD he worked as a consultant before joining the University of Southampton in 2002.
He has served as Editorial Board member for Géotechnique (2009-2012) and Geomechanics for Energy and the Environment (2014-2017), as Vice-chair of UK’s Association for Computational Mechanics - UK-ACM, at the time called ACME (2009-2010), and as external evaluator on behalf of the Romanian National Research Council and the Hellenic Quality Assurance and Accreditation Agency.
He is a member of the Editorial Board of Granular Matter, of the UK-ACM Executive Board, the Board of Directors of the ALERT/Geomaterials European network of geomechanics experts, and the EPSRC Peer Review College. He also serves as external evaluator for the European Commission’s Research Executive Agency.
In 2017 he was a co-recipient of ICE's Baker Medal for a paper titled "Thermo-poro-mechanical analysis of landslides: from creeping behaviour to catastrophic failure", published in Geotechnique (DOI: 10.1680/jgeot.15.LM.006). He was also co-recipient of the 2017 BGA Medal for a paper titled "A behavioural framework for fibre-reinforced gravel", also published in Geotechnique (DOI: 10.1680/jgeot.16.P.023)
His Web of Science ResearcherID record is A-8609-2008.
His ORCID ID is 0000-0002-2662-9320
Prizes
- Benjamin Baker Medal (2017)
- British Geotechnical Association Medal (2017)