Specialization Areas: Geotechnical

GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING
Geotechnical engineering deals with soil, rock and underground water, and their relation to design, construction and operation of engineering projects. The Canadian Geotechnical Society is one of the oldest and most active engineering societies in Canada. Canadian geotechnical engineers are well-known around the world. Geotechnical engineering has evolved and branched off into new areas such as geoenviromental engineering, which deals with underground environmental problems, and geomechanics.

Geotechnical Engineering Faculty
Richard Wan, Ron Wong, Jocelyn Grozic

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Computational Geomechanics

Development of robust finite element algorithms for modelling plastic flow, creep and relaxation behaviour of geomaterials in boundary value problems. Modelling transport phenomena using the finite element theory. Operator split schemes. Application to contaminant transport problems in geo-environmental engineering.

Environmental Geotechnology

Leachate migration through clay and clay fly ash liners, effect of polymers and other additives on properties of liners; effect of chemical spills on soils and remediation of such effects.

Frozen Soils

Strength and creep properties of frozen fine grained soils.

Oil Sands

Geomechanical characterization of oil sand (thermoplasticity); multi-phase (gas-oil-water) flow in deformable or fractured media.

Pipeline Mechanics

Modelling three dimensional soil-pipeline interaction by Continuum Fourier Finite Elements. Computation of moisture transport, heat, creep, frost heave and thaw consolidation in a coupled framework by special variational principles and the method of penalization.

Rock Mechanics

Investigation of physico-chemical effects of drilling mud systems on fractured brittle shales of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Foothills region. Characterization of joint roughness by fractals; modelling of hydraulic and mechanical response of rock joints. Development of time dependent constitutive laws for soft rocks. Visco-plastic augmentation of 3-D Hock-Brown plasticity based model. Modelling time dependent room closures in potash underground mines.

Soil Improvement

Lime and chemical stabilization of soils, reinforced soil, in-situ soil modification.

Soil Mechanics

Model testing of driven and cast-in-place piles in sand to determine soil pile interaction, limiting depth, end and frictional resistance, effect of plug formation.

Strain Localization

Study of instabilities in soil behaviour; bifurcation theory, shear band formation and advanced constitutive models. Modelling discontinuous behaviour of soil structures by special finite elements. Modelling borehole instability in oil sands.

Soil Remediation

In-situ bioremediation process; enhanced in-situ soil remediation methods; remediation in low-permeability soil and in cold regions.

Swelling Shale

Laboratory and numerical studies on swelling and softening behaviour of clay shale; risk assessment in slope instability.

Underground Excavation

Tunnel and shaft constructions in soils and rocks; mining instability.

Waste By-Product Utilization

Geotechnical and microstructural properties of fly ashes, bottom ash and other by-products, stabilized fly ash for pavements, embankments, dykes and backfill.

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Geotechnical Labs and Facilities
The geotechnical laboratory is equipped with a number of conventional triaxial testing machines including an automated stress path triaxial apparatus (both monotonic and cyclic). We also have an automated direct shear box apparatus.

Computer facilities include a large number of Pentium based PC's, O2 SGI (Silicon Graphics) Workstations, and the Civil Engineering Department High Performance Computation Server which is an SGI Origin 2000 (256 MB RAM, 25 GB HD) with a pair of processors.

Additional Information
More about geotechnical engineering