GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING
How do buildings interact with the nature soil underneath?
How do we keep natural slopes from sliding away?
How do we remove and replace soil so that it will not move afterwards?
How does soil move during an earthquake?
PHOTO BY: WOOD
DIGGING DEEPER: GEOTECHNICAL
Geotechnical engineers like to say that soil is the foundation for all civil engineering infrastructure. This is true, as under every building (left picture), road (right picture), dam, or other piece of infrastructure, is soil. The geotechnical engineer makes sure that the infrastructure is sitting on soil that will not fail, and this is called the foundation. Foundations are either deep (10-300 ft) or shallow (as thin as one foot).
PHOTO BY: BRAHAM
PHOTO BY: BRAHAM
PHOTO BY: BRAHAM
PHOTO BY: BRAHAM
Often when building new infrastructure, soil is moved around and new hills are created. The side of these hills are called slopes, and we want to make sure that the slopes stay in place. This is called slope stability, and can be achieved by either installing plants, rocks, or building retaining walls to keep the soil from moving.
Soil behaves much differently when it is dry versus when it is wet. This impacts all areas of geotechnical engineering, including soil dynamics (how soil moves), earthquake engineering, ground improvement, and hydrogeology.
PHOTO BY: GARVER
PHOTO BY: CRAFTON TULL
There are different ways we can measure the behavior of material and characterize how it is behaving or how it will behave. From remote sensing (using remote sensing to look at soil movement) to nondestructive material characterization (running a test in-place that does not damage the soil) to using computer simulations, such as Discrete Element Modeling (DEM) to predict how soil behaves.
PHOTO BY: COFFMAN
PHOTO BY: BARRY
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