BGA 17th Annual Conference 2020: session 1

Overview

Challenges and opportunities of the next decade and beyond – Dr Jonathan Morris, Cementation Skanska

We are in a period of massive change and technical advances yet the world of construction and of geotechnics in particular has not really caught up. We have virtual meetings, use BIM and finite element tools and techniques and access plant remotely, but a lot of what we do today would be instantly recognisable to a time traveller from the 1960s.

In this talk Jonathan will describe the developments he hopes to see in the next ten years and some of the challenges that we will likely encounter along the way.

Evolution of design and construction of ground improvement techniques – Bob Essler, Managing Director, RD Geotech Ltd

The current version of Eurocode 7 says very little about the design of ground improvement and this has been addressed in the upcoming revised code within Clause 10 of Part 3. Eurocode 7 is now split into three parts: Part 1: Geotechnical Design - General Rules; Part 2: Geotechnical Design – Ground Properties; Part 3: Geotechnical Design – Geotechnical Structures.

The presentation will set out what is required in general for progressing geotechnical design with special reference to ground improvement and will then discuss the detailed design approach for ground improvement set out within Clause 10 of EN1997 Part 3.

The presentation will outline the design of the two main families of ground improvement which are Diffused and Discrete and their sub families and discuss the different approach to the design of piles and rigid inclusions which are very similar but have generated a great deal of discussion. The presentation will also outline some statistical methods for assessing ground improvement construction.

Response of soils to cyclic wet-dry and freeze-thaw processes – Professor Snehasis Tripathy, Cardiff University

The talk will focus on the relevance of studies related to the impact of seasonal climatic processes on the behaviour of soils in the vadose (unsaturated) zone, particularly in the context of long term climate changes. It will discuss some laboratory investigation approaches and the associated challenges. The presentation will go on to show some recent experimental findings on the volume change behaviour of soils when subjected to wet-freeze-thaw-dry cycles.

Next sessions

Session 2 - Tuesday 14 July
Session 3 - Tuesday 21 July