Geotechnical Design

What you'll learn

• Select at-rest, active or passive earth pressure from the expected wall movement and calculate pressures and thrusts by Rankine's and Coulomb's theories.
• Add the effects of surcharge, water, compaction and earthquake shaking to the earth pressure on a wall, and specify drainage to control water pressure.
• Check gravity and cantilever retaining walls for sliding, eccentricity, bearing and global stability by limit states design with load and resistance factors.
• Design mechanically stabilized earth walls for external stability and for the rupture and pullout of steel and geosynthetic reinforcement.
• Determine the embedment, anchor force and bending moment of cantilever and anchored sheet pile walls by Blum's and the free earth support methods.
• Design braced and anchored excavations with apparent pressure envelopes, and check basal heave and the uplift of clay over a confined aquifer.
• Choose drained or undrained analyses for slopes and apply the infinite slope, planar wedge and φ = 0 circular methods.
• Analyse slopes with layered soils and seasonal water levels by the ordinary and Bishop simplified methods of slices, and review computer analyses.
• Compare slope stabilization measures, select a remedy, and plan instrumentation and monitoring with trigger levels and responses.
• Select ground improvement methods for soft and loose soils and estimate their effect on settlement and its time, including vertical drains, columns and lightweight fill.
• Assess frost susceptibility, estimate frost penetration and heave, and design foundations, walls and pipes against frost, adfreeze and thaw weakening, with an overview of permafrost.
• Prepare a geotechnical design report with a design basis, integrated checks of interacting elements, construction requirements, monitoring and a risk register.