MSCA COFUND PhD@Tec21 - PhD position in Wood Science : MAX-WOOD Multiscale Analysis by X-ray tomography of WOOD densification

id="offer-description" class="ecl-u-type-heading-2 ecl-u-mt-none ecl-u-mb-l">Offer Description Context and work environment . The PhD will be hosted at the Soils, Solids, Structures, Risks laboratory (3SR, Univ. Grenoble Alpes) in Grenoble, and will work in close collaboration with the Néel Institute. The research will be supervised by Sabine Rolland du Roscoat (Professor, 3SR), expert in X-ray imaging of fibrous materials under loading and Julio Caesar da Silva (Researcher, Institut Neel), expert in hierarchical X-ray imaging of materials. The team will also involve Adrien Didier (Assistant Professor, 3SR), specialized in experimental mechanics, and Laurent Orgéas (Researcher, 3SR), who is an expert in mechanics of fibrous cellulosic materials. Mission and main activities . Among cellulose-based materials, wood has a naturally ideally structured cellular microstructure composed of very strong, crystalline cellulose microfibrils embedded in a matrix of porous biopolymers. The longitudinal Young's modulus of the walls of these cells/fibers is on the order of 50-60 GPa, and their failure strength is in the GPa range, close to the best petrosourced fiber-reinforced composites. However, due to a high porosity, the mechanical properties of wood at larger scales are unfortunately lower that the ones of the fibers. One way to increase these properties is to combine a controlled delignification process of wood cell walls with an optimized densification of the cellular structure. It i