Research Paper by a UFAZ Graduate Published in a Prestigious Q1-Indexed Journal

A scientific article co-authored by Rashad Abbasov, a graduate of the Master’s program in Geosciences at the French-Azerbaijani University (UFAZ) and a lecturer at the Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University, has been published in the high-impact, Q1-ranked journal Engineering Geology.

The study, titled “Assessing simplified approaches in modeling rainfall-induced landslides using Richards' equation with Biot poroelasticity,” provides a rigorous scientific investigation of hydro-mechanical (HM) modeling of rainfall-triggered landslides. For the first time, the coupling of Richards' equation for unsaturated flow with Biot poroelasticity has been systematically formulated, and a comparative evaluation of various model simplification approaches has been conducted. The study presents both a solid theoretical framework and a critical assessment of how simplifications affect prediction reliability.

For the practical implementation of the model, numerical simulations were carried out using COMSOL Multiphysics, and the results were validated against benchmark scenarios. The model was further tested on a real case study at one of Azerbaijan’s most active landslide zones – the Badamdar landslide area. The findings reveal a significant relationship between model complexity and prediction accuracy.

The key scientific conclusion of the research is that while simplified models are computationally faster and widely used in the literature, the fully coupled hydro-mechanical model provides substantially higher reliability and predictive accuracy. Moreover, the application of advanced numerical algorithms significantly enhances the computational efficiency of the fully coupled model, making it competitive with simplified approaches.

The article has been published in Open Access format under a Creative Commons license and is freely available to the international scientific community.