Water has a way of seeping between any two theories!
About the speaker:
Dr Brian Simpson is a director of Ove Arup & Partners Ltd and a principal of Arup Geotechnics. He is also an Arup Fellow and an Honorary Professor at the University of Nottingham, UK. He has worked on a wide range of geotechnical and ground-structure interaction problems, maintaining particular interests in numerical modelling, retaining structures and tunnels.
About the event:
The title of the lecture is taken from a saying attributed to Casagrande. It surely should be the motto of every geotechnical engineer. The lecture will examine some situations in which failure to predict or control water pressures has led to failures, or other difficulties in design, and will then review recent thinking in the development of Eurocode 7 for safety in designs dominated by water pressure.
Geotechnical design rests fundamentally on the principle of effective stress. The angle of shearing resistance, φ′, is the dominant parameter in many analyses and in many cases it is reasonably well understood. Life could be simple – if there were no water in the ground. In practice, effective stress calculations are of no use until the water pressures are reliably defined – and that can be tricky!
In some designs, friction is not involved and safety depends on a balance between water pressure and weight of soil or structures. Again, the mechanics are very simple, but it is difficult to decide how to provide appropriate margins of safety so as to achieve robust designs without unnecessary conservatism, which is usually expensive.
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