Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

Definition

Technology that deals with soil (and rock) as an engineering material in civil engineering projects.

Examples of Application Areas

1. Foundations
   • "shallow" e.g., spread footings for buildings
   • "deep" e.g., piles for offshore platform
     
     
2. Earth Structures
   • Compacted earth fill for dam
   • Landfill for waste storage
     
     
3. Slopes and Excavations
   • Cut slopes for highway
   • Excavation for subway
     
     
4. Retaining Structures
   • Slurry wall with tieback anchors
   • Gravity retaining wall
     
     
5. Remediation of Contaminated Soil and Groundwater

Types of Input Required to Solve Above Problems (for Soil)

1. Geology and Exploration: General nature and extent of soils involved
2. Soil Mechanics: Evaluation of Engineering Properties of soils and Theoretical Analyses to predict behavior of "structure"
3. Feasibility: Economics, environmental, legal, practical
4. Experience: Regarding what has happened in the past - successes and failures
5. Field Evaluation: Measurements of actual performance to evaluate and possibly alter design during construction
6. Engineering Judgment: Combined with above - final solution (increasing use of reliability analyses to "formalize" process)

What Makes Soil Mechanics Interesting and Challenging (CCL's opinion)

Soil amongst most variable and difficult of all materials to understand and model

1. Complex stress-strain (non-linear, irreversible)
2. Properties highly variable function of soil types and stress history
3. Properties change with time, stress, environment, …
4. Every site has different soil conditions - new challenge
5. Soil "hidden" underground and data on small fraction of deposit

Emphasis on testing (in field and in lab) plus field monitoring

Outline