Staff profile

Marti Lloret-Cabot is an Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Department of Engineering at Durham University.

He took this role after benefiting from a substantial international experience. He received his MEng degree in Civil Engineering at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC, Barcelona) in 2005. After graduation, he moved to Glasgow to pursue an international career as a Civil Engineer. He started working at Donaldson’s Associates (now COWI) as a Junior Geotechnical Engineer in the Glasgow and York offices. By the end of 2006, the University of Strathclyde (USTRAT) awarded him a Synergy scholarship to begin a joint PhD degree between USTRAT and the University of Glasgow (UofG) which he completed in 2011. In 2010, he moved to the Netherlands to work at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) for two years as an Experienced Marie Curie Fellow. He then moved to Australia in 2012 where he spent about five years at the Centre of Excellence for Geotechnical Science and Engineering of the University of Newcastle (UoN, Australia). In 2017, he secured funding to develop his Individual Marie Skłodowska-Curie project "COUPLED" at UofG.

Research and Teaching

Marti’s research is in geotechnical engineering, focussing on the development of advanced constitutive models for soils to help interpreting experimental soil's behaviour and to solve geotechnical boundary value problems involving complex soil behaviour (e.g. partial saturation, anisotropy) after their subsequent implementation into finite element programs. He has also made important contributions in the area of risk and variability in geotechnical engineering. Particularly relevant is his publication on modelling the spatial variation of soil properties which received the GeoRisk 2014 Best Paper award in 2015 and the 2017 Most Cited award in 2018.

In the Department, Marti teaches in the areas of ground and structural engineering covering Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering at L3, and in L1 Mechanics of Systems. He is also the coordinator of L3 Civil Design.

• Mechanics of saturated and unsaturated soils
• Modelling soil spatial variability
• Modelling water flow under partially saturated conditions
• Numerical and constitutive modelling of soils and soft rocks

• 2000: 2019 - 2022 Editorial Board Member for Geotechnique:
• 2000: Since 2020: Editorial Board Member of the Canadian Geotechnical Journal:

Journal Article

• Scarfone, R., Wheeler, S. J., & Lloret-Cabot, M. (2022). A hysteretic hydraulic constitutive model for unsaturated soils and application to capillary barrier systems. Geomechanics for Energy and the Environment, 30, Article 100224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gete.2020.100224
• Lloret-Cabot, M., & Sheng, D. (2022). Assessing the accuracy and efficiency of different order implicit and explicit integration schemes. Computers and Geotechnics, 141, Article 104531. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compgeo.2021.104531
• Lloret-Cabot, M., Wheeler, S. J., Gens, A., & Sloan, S. W. (2021). Numerical integration of an elasto-plastic critical state model for soils under unsaturated conditions. Computers and Geotechnics, 137, Article 104299. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compgeo.2021.104299
• Scarfone, R., Wheeler, S. J., & Lloret-Cabot, M. (2020). Conceptual Hydraulic Conductivity Model for Unsaturated Soils at Low Degree of Saturation and Its Application to the Study of Capillary Barrier Systems. Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering, 146(10), Article 04020106. https://doi.org/10.1061/%28asce%29gt.1943-5606.0002357
• Bruno, A. W., Gallipoli, D., Rouainia, M., & Lloret-Cabot, M. (2020). A bounding surface mechanical model for unsaturated cemented soils under isotropic stresses. Computers and Geotechnics, 125, Article 103673. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compgeo.2020.103673
• Lloret-Cabot, M., Wheeler, S. J., Pineda, J. A., Romero, E., & Sheng, D. (2018). Reply to “Discussion of “From saturated to unsaturated conditions and vice versa” by M. Lloret-Cabot et al. (DOI 10.1007/s11440-017-0577-6)” by S. Qi et al. (DOI 10.1007/s11440-017-0625-2). Acta Geotechnica, 13(2), 493-495. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11440-017-0626-1
• Lloret-Cabot, M., Wheeler, S. J., Pineda, J. A., Romero, E., & Sheng, D. (2018). From saturated to unsaturated conditions and vice versa. Acta Geotechnica, 13(1), 15-37. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11440-017-0577-6
• Lloret-Cabot, M., Wheeler, S. J., & Sánchez, M. (2017). A unified mechanical and retention model for saturated and unsaturated soil behaviour. Acta Geotechnica, 12(1), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11440-016-0497-x
• Lloret-Cabot, M., Sloan, S. W., Sheng, D., & Abbo, A. J. (2016). Error behaviour in explicit integration algorithms with automatic substepping. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 108(9), 1030-1053. https://doi.org/10.1002/nme.5245
• D’Onza, F., Wheeler, S., Gallipoli, D., Barrera Bucio, M., Hofmann, M., Lloret-Cabot, M., …Vassallo, R. (2015). Benchmarking selection of parameter values for the Barcelona basic model. Engineering Geology, 196, 99-118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enggeo.2015.06.022
• Lloret-Cabot, M., Fenton, G. A., & Hicks, M. A. (2015). Message from 2014 Best Paper Award Winners. Georisk: Assessment and Management of Risk for Engineered Systems and Geohazards, 9(2), https://doi.org/10.1080/17499518.2015.1056765
• Lloret-Cabot, M., Wheeler, S. J., Pineda, J. A., Sheng, D., & Gens, A. (2014). Relative performance of two unsaturated soil models using different constitutive variables. Canadian Geotechnical Journal, 51(12), 1423-1437. https://doi.org/10.1139/cgj-2013-0462
• Lloret-Cabot, M., Fenton, G. A., & Hicks, M. A. (2014). On the estimation of scale of fluctuation in geostatistics. Georisk: Assessment and Management of Risk for Engineered Systems and Geohazards, 8(2), 129-140. https://doi.org/10.1080/17499518.2013.871189
• Lloret-Cabot, M., Wheeler, S. J., & Sánchez, M. (2014). Unification of plastic compression in a coupled mechanical and water retention model for unsaturated soils. Canadian Geotechnical Journal, 51(12), 1488-1493. https://doi.org/10.1139/cgj-2013-0360
• Lloret-Cabot, M., Sánchez, M., & Wheeler, S. J. (2013). Formulation of a three-dimensional constitutive model for unsaturated soils incorporating mechanical-water retention couplings. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 37(17), 3008-3035. https://doi.org/10.1002/nag.2176
• Lloret-Cabot, M., Hicks, M. A., & van den Eijnden, A. P. (2012). Investigation of the reduction in uncertainty due to soil variability when conditioning a random field using Kriging. Géotechnique Letters, 2(3), 123-127. https://doi.org/10.1680/geolett.12.00022