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Geotechdata.info Blog
an open-topic weblog for your less-technical/more-general geotechnical articles and discussions with emphasis on experimental geotechnics.

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Experimental Geotechnics: from Academic research to engineering application
Azad Koliji, Geotechnical Engineer, PhD, Nov 22, 2009
In geotechnical engineering, experiments play an important role both in research and in practice. Theoretical developments are largely based on the physical research experiments. When these theories are used in practice; they still need to be accompanied by laboratory and in-situ testing in order to determine the soil properties for each engineering application.

As in many other disciplines, experimental geotechnics faces different steps of evolutions from the academic research domains to the practical engineering applications. In research, the main focus is often placed on laboratory testing developments. Advanced thermo-hydro-mechanical load cells, dynamic tests, or use of hi-tech image analysis techniques are some examples of new developments in research labs. These advanced tests are usually carried out under very controlled conditions for the aim of understanding a quality rather than measuring a quantity. Typically, they provide a better understanding of the material behavior, an essential issue for developing theories and constitutive models capable of describing this behavior.

Use of such advanced experiments is practice, however, is not that common due to their cost, difficulty, availability, and even lack of widely accepted credibility. To these factors, we should also add the fact that the real conditions are usually far from the fully controlled condition of the research laboratory tests. Practicing engineers often need to know, in an optimized way, the geotechnical condition of their projects and get a realistic engineering feeling about that. This is usually done using conventional tests and sometimes using new in-situ methods to describe a quantity as in borehole camera or even to directly measure a geotechnical quantity.

It is clear that the advancement of experimental geotechnics is ceaselessly being continued both in research and in practice. However, the speed and the trend of these advancements always are not – and should not necessarily be - the same in the two domains. Having that said, it seems that there is still room for closer interaction between the academia and the practical engineering. Once theories and models are developed based on the advanced experiments in academia, scholars could think of simple alternative tests to be used for determination of their model parameters in practice. On the other side, today, geotechnical engineering is not a traditional discipline and the community of practicing engineers could rely more on the use of experimental research developments in practical engineering applications.

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