Enseignement de l'énergie. Une recherche pluridisciplinaire de l'INRP

Cette recherche demandée à l'INRP par différents organismes oeuvrant dans le domaine énergétique s'est surtout axée sur une approche pluridisciplinaire cohérente du " savoir-énergie ". Elle a donné lieu à la réalisation, dans plusieurs collèges et lycées, de progressions pluridisciplinaires importantes par leur durée et l'intérêt suscité auprès des élèves. Elle a conduit ses concepteurs à élaborer des dossiers pédagogiques qui devraient aider les enseignants désireux de s'engager dans un travail pluridisciplinaire à propos de l'énergi

A re-annotation pipeline for Illumina BeadArrays: improving the interpretation of gene expression data.

Illumina BeadArrays are among the most popular and reliable platforms for gene expression profiling. However, little external scrutiny has been given to the design, selection and annotation of BeadArray probes, which is a fundamental issue in data quality and interpretation. Here we present a pipeline for the complete genomic and transcriptomic re-annotation of Illumina probe sequences, also applicable to other platforms, with its output available through a Web interface and incorporated into Bioconductor packages. We have identified several problems with the design of individual probes and we show the benefits of probe re-annotation on the analysis of BeadArray gene expression data sets. We discuss the importance of aspects such as probe coverage of individual transcripts, alternative messenger RNA splicing, single-nucleotide polymorphisms, repeat sequences, RNA degradation biases and probes targeting genomic regions with no known transcription. We conclude that many of the Illumina probes have unreliable original annotation and that our re-annotation allows analyses to focus on the good quality probes, which form the majority, and also to expand the scope of biological information that can be extracted

Thermal-elastic stresses and the criticality of the continental crust

Heating or cooling can lead to high stresses in rocks due to the different thermal-elastic properties of minerals. In the upper 4 km of the crust, such internal stresses might cause fracturing. Yet it is unclear if thermal elasticity contributes significantly to critical stresses and failure deeper in Earth's continental crust, where ductile creep causes stress relaxation. We combined a heating experiment conducted in a Synchrotron microtomograph (Advanced Photon Source, USA) with numerical simulations to calculate the grain-scale stress field in granite generated by slow burial. We find that deviatoric stresses >100 MPa can be stored during burial, with relaxation times from 100's to 1000's ka, even in the ductile crust. Hence, grain-scale thermal-elastic stresses may serve as nuclei for instabilities, thus rendering the continental crust close to criticality

A re-annotation pipeline for Illumina BeadArrays: improving the interpretation of gene expression data.

Illumina BeadArrays are among the most popular and reliable platforms for gene expression profiling. However, little external scrutiny has been given to the design, selection and annotation of BeadArray probes, which is a fundamental issue in data quality and interpretation. Here we present a pipeline for the complete genomic and transcriptomic re-annotation of Illumina probe sequences, also applicable to other platforms, with its output available through a Web interface and incorporated into Bioconductor packages. We have identified several problems with the design of individual probes and we show the benefits of probe re-annotation on the analysis of BeadArray gene expression data sets. We discuss the importance of aspects such as probe coverage of individual transcripts, alternative messenger RNA splicing, single-nucleotide polymorphisms, repeat sequences, RNA degradation biases and probes targeting genomic regions with no known transcription. We conclude that many of the Illumina probes have unreliable original annotation and that our re-annotation allows analyses to focus on the good quality probes, which form the majority, and also to expand the scope of biological information that can be extracted

Coda wave interferometry during the heating of deep geothermal reservoir rocks

Abstract Coda wave interferometry (CWI) is a high-resolution technique that aims at tracking small changes in a diffusive medium from the time correlation of seismic waveforms. CWI has been widely used in recent years to monitor the fine-scale evolution of fault zones and more recently of deep reservoirs. However, to provide a quantitative interpretation of the reservoir, direct modeling of physical effects like the influence of temperature on seismic wave scattering is required to investigate temperature effects from measurements of velocity changes. Here, we propose to quantify the impact of thermo-elastic deformation on CWI measurements by comparing experimental results obtained from a previous study on Westerly Granite to a numerical approach based on two combined codes (SPECFEM2D and Code_Aster) for modeling wave propagation in complex media during thermo-elastic deformation. We obtain two major results. First, we show that multiple reflections on the boundaries of our simplified numerical sample reproduce well the wave scattering properties of the experimental granitic sample characterized by a complex mineral assembly and a large set of microcracks. We based our comparison on the wave diffusion model that describes both the experimental and numerical samples (similarity in energy density function and mean free path). We also show that both samples share a similar thermo-elastic behavior, but only after the second heating and cooling cycle. Second, the stretching technique used for CWI measurements on both samples reveals reversible time shifts correlated with the thermo-elastic deformation of the sample. However, the influence of thermo-elastic deformation is different between our numerical proxy and the experimental sample. We discuss the role of irreversible deformation (e.g., microcracking) for the observed discrepancy by introducing temperature dependence of elastic moduli in the model. These results suggest that there are open perspectives to monitor thermal strain in geothermal reservoirs using CWI