Soil Mechanics I

Credit: 2
Lecture volume: 90 min. x 16 weeks
Aimed at: 2nd-year undergraduate students

SYNOPSIS

SYNOPSIS

Soil is arguably one of the most important building materials, as any infrastructure or livelihood is bound to interact with it. This is to be seen in how bridges, buildings, railways and highways rest on soil, how tunnels run through soil, and how communities are threatened by potential landslides and soil liquefaction, just to name a few examples. Soil mechanics, a study of soil behaviour to serve construction activities and disaster risk assessment, forms one of the main pillars in civil engineering education. The study involves a wide spectrum of knowledge building and analytical work, involving, for example, classifying soils based on engineering properties, analysing their deformation and failure, and explaining fluid transport phenomena through them. This lecture series is the first in the suite of lectures on soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering provided in our undergraduate curriculum and is a gateway to further studies followed up by Soil Mechanics II.

LECTURE CONTENTS

This lecture series covers a half of the contents that would appear in typical textbooks. The rest are to be covered in Soil Mechanics II.

• Introduction: What do we study in soil mechanics / geotechnical engineering?
• Physical properties of soils
• Classification of soils
• Fluid transport in soils I: Permeability and Darcy's law
• Fluid transport in soils II: Flow net and analysis of flow
• Fluid transport in soils III: Piping and boiling
• Stress analysis in elastic media I: Stress, strain, elasticity and Boussinesq's solution
• Stress analysis in elastic media II: Application of stress analysis
• Consolidation of soils I: Principle of effective stress
• Consolidation of soils II: Terzaghi's consolidation equation
• Consolidation of soils I: Analysis of ground settlement
• Consolidation of soils IV: Consolidation and ground settlement control

LANGUAGE

The lecture is basically conducted in English, but brief explanations in Japanese are also provided to facilitate Japanese-speaking students’ understanding. The slides and downloadable handouts are all prepared bilingual (English and Japanese).

WEBPAGES

http://www.eng.hokudai.ac.jp/labo/soilmech/lectures/SM1_nishimura_en.html